We’re Moving!

Hi everyone!  Pack your bags, people, we’re outta here.

I finally reached a breaking point with the free hosting provided by wordpress, and have decided to move my site to its own hosting, http://casuallyvicious.com .  Please update any of your page links, RSS feeds (no idea if that actually is necessary or not). Or, y’know, subscribe to the new RSS feed over there, or drop by from time to time.

There’s a post over there explaining why, but the quick answer is that the too-many-posts on the front page was driving me up a wall, and made me stop blogging until I could figure out a solution.  I still don’t have a solution that’s done, but I’m hopeful I can accomplish it now.

This will be the last post I make on this site.

Nuclear Guilt

Yes, that’s Theramore, again.  This is going to be a very personal post – if you want happy entertainment, I suggest you skip this installment.
This scenario continues to bother me on a very personal level.  I’ve done this already.  And, not that I’ve done it during the pre-Mists update, that’s not what I mean.  Most of us did it then, it was the first fresh content in a while.

I mean, in real life.

This is going to take some explaining, I realize.  Hardly anyone else has ever heard this before – I usually stay dead silent on the subject.  Give me a little room, and I’ll try to explain.

I was born in the mid-seventies, in Philadelphia.  I barely remember living in an old Victorian house on a corner in Ridley Park, PA, just outside of Philly.  My father was a nuclear engineer, he had hard hats and geiger-counters and cool science stuff.

Then, Three Mile Island (TMI) happened.  If you’re unaware, Three Mile Island is a nuclear power plant on the Susquehanna River (we nicknamed it the “Suck-A-Banana”), just south of Harrisburg, out in central Pennsylvania.  In 1979, there was a nuclear meltdown at that power plant.  At least, that’s how it happened to most of you.  That’s not how it happened to us.

No one knew what had happened, when it actually happened.  The agencies involved in running TMI had to put together a “research team” to go into the reactor and find out what occurred.  My father was put on that research team.

Some of what I’m going to tell you is what my mother could tell me later, some of it is what I vividly remember, and some of the details happened to have emerged only in the past five years during therapy.  So, if my storytelling here wanders off the path a little, I apologize.
Being on a team to go into a reactor that had an “event” was a horrifyingly stressful situation.  People had to walk into the reactor wearing lead suits, point flashlights around, and try to make a diagnosis, and figure out what to do next.  That’s what the research team was.

They were awake, running 24/7, for weeks.  The research team members eventually took to drinking alcohol in order to try to get some sleep.  They were terrified.  There had never been a nuclear disaster in the history of the US prior to this event – they didn’t know what could happen.  Was there going to be a crater, like in the above picture?  How many people were going to die?

At one point my father told me that one of the engineers on the team stripped his lead suit off and tried running straight into the reactor.  My father had to hit him in the back of the head with a pipe and drag him out.  In turn, my father also took his glove off while inside, and held a fuel rod – that’s the uranium that’s having the nuclear reaction – in his bare hand because he was trying to kill himself.

My father had given my mother instructions that if he called and told her that it was unrecoverable, that she should do the following: she should load the shotgun, and shoot my brother and I in the back.  The pellet spread was bound to get us in the hearts, and she wouldn’t have to see our faces when we die.  She was instructed to overdose on pills afterwards.  He didn’t want his family to have to live through a nuclear apocalypse.  That’s how scared they were.

He did, in fact, call and tell her it was unrecoverable.  Thankfully, she didn’t follow orders.  I want to be very clear, I love my mother.

We moved out to the area near the reactor.  At that time, it was diagnosed as a meltdown, but it was undecided whether or not they should “contain” it.  So, let me give you a quick run-down on a reactor – they’re pretty simple, but you’ll need this to understand the context.  Nuclear fuel rods are uranium.  They emit radiation, small particles from the atoms.  Put enough radiation into a vat of water, the water gets hot.  That becomes steam, which is used to turn turbines and generate power.  That water then goes out to the “cooling towers” – the giant curved cylinders, to become less hot, before being pumped back into the reactor for another go ’round.

The rods don’t actually touch the water.  At least, they’re not supposed to.  In a meltdown, the tubes that the rods go into, well, melt, and now the rod touches the water.  If there are any nuclear engineers reading this and would like to correct me, please do, but I think I’m basically getting it right.

If the rods touch the water, the water is then contaminated.  Containing that contaminated water, then, is what “containment” means.  Instead of going to the cooling towers and evaporating away, and thereby creating a nuclear cloud that carries over the east coast, they lock it all down in cement, and turn it into a nuclear waste storage facility.  If containment couldn’t hold, however, it would blow up.  I don’t exactly know the details on that, I think the rods continue to heat and contaminate the water, until you get a nuclear detonation.

At this point my father was an alcoholic, understandably so.  Unfortunately, he was a mean alcoholic.  My parents fought a lot, I remember bottles being thrown at me, tables being thrown at my mother, my brother stepping in before I got hit by my father, etc.  When I heard the garage door open, I’d run and hide, so I wouldn’t have to put up with him.  Things were hard.

Sometime during all of this, I remember one Saturday afternoon my father brought home a gigantic notebook.  In it were 8.5″ x 11″ sheets, three-hole punched, with numbers.  There were literally hundreds of pages.  On each page, numbers were spaced in an array, maybe 12 digits in each number, 6 or 8 to a row, and I have no idea how many rows to a page.  It was a lot of numbers.

We had an IBM PC, the kind with the dual-floppy drives in it.  He explained how I was supposed to read the numbers from the page, and type them in on whatever program it was.  I was 5 or 6 at the time.  I vividly remember him setting down a large plastic cup full of ice and coke in front of me, slapping my shoulder, and saying, “Son, don’t make a mistake, or you’ll blow up the entire east coast.  I’m going to bed.”

Yes, I’m pretty sure that was the data that was used to determine whether or not they should attempt containment.  I don’t know that for fact, though.  It could have been his sick sense of humor – but I do know he had been awake for days on end, and he was reluctantly asking me to do it because it needed to be done, I was smart and good with numbers, and he desperately needed to sleep.  He wasn’t going to be able to do it himself, and of everyone else in the house,  I was the most likely to get it right.

If you’ve gone and done your wikipedia research, you will have learned that containment was deemed not viable.  It was decided that it would eventually blow, and that they needed to “release” – yes, the contaminated water was going to be allowed to evaporate into the atmosphere, and contaminate the land.  The release was done slowly, it took over five years to completely evaporate, before they could dismantle that reactor.  I am pretty sure I handled that data.  I am concerned that I made mistakes.

I realize this isn’t a good way to see it.  I was the same age as my daughter is now – and I would never, ever, ask her to not blow up the east coast.  I love her, I have a lot of faith in her and she’s very smart and caring – but c’mon, no parent should ever do that to such a small child.  It’s completely insane.

I’ve tried finding any evidence of what harm that release may have caused.  There are no direct deaths to my knowledge.  Quite a lot of cows got some sort of cancer or tumor in their throats.  Central Pennsylvania is dairy country, there’s a lot of cows there.  The piece of data that worries me the most, though, is that consistent with the release was a dramatic spike in local miscarriages.  Something like 1100 mothers miscarried more than usual.

My mistake(s) may have cost 1,100 unborn children their lives.

I’m sorry.

This is guilt that I carry, and can’t seem to shake.  My parents eventually divorced.  My father went on to marry a woman that was on the research team.  There was suspicion that he was having an affair with her prior to the meltdown, and that perhaps he made that phone call as an “easy out.”

At some point prior to the divorce, he abducted me for a week, kept trying to convince me that I should live with him and this other lady.  He only took me – he didn’t take my older brother.  I kept trying to explain that brothers should be allowed to grow up together.  I guess I became so despondent that he took me home.  I know I wasn’t over 10 years old at the time, I was probably more like 7 or 8.

My father and I no longer talk to each other – I didn’t see a point in it.  Once the divorce occurred, he only called once a year, and almost never sent child support.  I had to tell him it wasn’t worth the effort, and that my life was a lot better once he was out of the house – I was maybe 14 at the time.

So, I’ve already unwittingly participated in a nuclear disaster.  You’ll excuse me if I don’t queue up for Theramore ever again.

This has been bothering me since the Theramore scenario was first released, actually.  I haven’t had the nerve, or the time, to sit down and write it all out, mostly because this isn’t stuff you share.  Honestly, I know that.  From years of sharing bits and pieces, I’ve learned that everyone has some pile of darkness in their past they’d rather forget about.  I’ve even been avoiding blogging for the purpose of trying to get away from feeling like I have to write this out.  But, I did have to write it.

This also finally answers Ambermist’s Meme and gets that off my chest.  Now before you go off feeling horrible, please remember, that was my childhood, not my entire life.  Since then, I have worked extremely hard at being good at what I do, being a loving father, a good husband, and enjoying my life.  Things are much better for me, now.

Cat Skill Map

Hi everyone,

I haven’t posted in a while, because an expansion dropped and I had to get my bearings.  I’m still leveling up (only at 88 currently), but I think I’ve got bear down pretty well now, and am moving onto my other side of things, feral.  I’m also pretty sure once I start pet-battling I’ll stop doing dungeons, dailies, going outside, eating, and really anything else, so it’s best if I get this out now.

Like my earlier bear post, this is an attempt to draw out the basics of the specialization’s gameplay, without getting too mired down in long-winded explanations or impressive theorycrafting.  There’s a lot of that available already, from some great sources.  What I’m trying to do is give you a quick visual so you can grasp the general design of the spec, and see if it’s for you, or maybe make something obvious that you have overlooked.

In my case, I use skill maps to help me navigate my keybindings and action bars, as it helps spell out what does what.

From a high-level perspective, cats use energy (a naturally refilling resource) to fuel their abilities.  These abilities make combo points onto the target.  With a standard UI, combo points show up as red circles on the outside of the unit frame of your target.  Combo points, and a little more energy, are used to do finishing moves.  If you’ve played a rogue, you know the territory.

I am not including the talent choices on the map – this is mostly because talents are all pretty useful, and choosing one negates the others on that tier.

I still used 11 categories on the map, this time they are:

1. Combo-point generators – these create combo points on the target
2. Finishing moves – these use the combo points
3. Self Buffs – these are basically offensive cooldowns
4. AoE – area of effect, use this for large groups of mobs
5. Crowd Control – different skills to incapacitate targets.  Note that stuns are indicated elsewhere.
6. Defenses – various things to give you a bit more survivability.
7. Heals – pretty obvious.
8. Interrupts – used to interrupt spell casting.
9. Bear – these will transform you into a bear, or require you to be in bear form to use.
10. Ranged Spells – you’ll use this when the mobs are far away.
11. Random Utilities – This is the catch-all for the rest of the stuff that you get.  You want a lot of this, but it doesn’t neatly fit into any of the other organizations.

Also, there’s a number of notations on the map.  The poorly-drawn red blob indicates a bleed effect, this is a DoT (damage over time).  A red plus after a skill indicates that it hits harder if the target is bleeding.

Green text denotes “good things”, and sometimes goes with the nearby green arrows.  Purple text is for requirements (you’ve heard a lot about positional requirements, now you can see which skills this affects).  Sometimes you have to be stealthed as well, this is also marked in purple.

Brown/yellow text is information about energy.  You can reduce the cost, or award extra energy for using particular abilities.  Note the Omen of Clarity proc as well, that’s a nice thing to pay attention to, and one I usually mess up in gameplay.

Green dots are “HoT”s (heal over time).  Black X’s are skills that you have, that you’ll probably never map to an action bar.  They’re for boomkin, but we get them as well.  They cost mana, will knock us out of cat form, and hit like wet noodles as a cat.  I ignore those.

I recommend clicking on this to see it in a larger format, there’s some small text.

Pay close attention to what causes bleeds, as a few buttons cause more damage when bleeds are rolling.  You can have more than one bleed on at a time.  This is the first secret to cat DPS – keep all the bleeds up.  The second secret is to hit the short-term cooldowns as often as possible, and do everything you can to keep all your green bonuses (on the map) continuing to go.

I hope this comes in handy for other visual learners out there.  Let me know if you spot any errors, or have any ideas for improvements.

Enjoy!

Five-dot-oh-foot!

My mother tried very hard not to swear in front of me while growing up, and her usual way out of the f-word wasn’t “fudge” like most people.  She’d say, “Oh, foot!” and stamp her foot when she was really frustrated or annoyed.  With her southern accent, it was pretty hard to take seriously, and I usually ended up laughing.

That’s about how my first run of the new-Guardian format worked.  I didn’t tank on the beta for the simple reason that I wanted to learn it with some friends, not having some PUGs typing “GOGOGO.”    Overall, the new scheme isn’t that bad.

Here’s what I liked:

• I LOVED not being starved out of using all my abilities.  When I first learned tanking, I had a few pulls go really, really south on me.  I didn’t have aggro, and I didn’t have rage to use any of my abilities to get aggro back (I think I was trying to pull fast enough to keep the gogo’ers happy, and my taunts were on cooldown).  Now, I can always hit attack buttons and get some threat back.  I rarely need to use a taunt.
• I liked the fun, new talents.  The self-heal cooldowns were awesome  – it’s pretty easy to get arrogant enough to think you don’t need a healer.

Here’s what I’m not liking:

• Screwing around with my talents is causing my action bars all kinds of grief.  I spend a lot of time thinking, “Wait, what was just there?”  I need variable action buttons, that do the same tier’s action (no matter what that action is).  Without it, I’m dragging things around and searching my spellbook for abilities that I can’t even remember the name of, or worse, the icon doesn’t even match the talent icon.  Yes, I’m looking at you Wild Charge.
• Savage Defense isn’t really relevant on my UI.  At all.  I know Arielle (@riftmaker) has posted quite a few times requesting this get addressed, and I’m in complete agreement.  Even on beta I had the blinking old-school Savage Defense UI aura, but it’s not on live.
• The charges to Savage Defense aren’t quite making sense.  I’m using Bartender4 just so I can properly map the overwhelming amount of abilities to my action bars, as my character shifts forms.  So, it could be my choice of add-ons making it harder, but… I get 3 charges.  I can’t push all three at the same time, the have to be distributed across time.   I need to have enough rage to use it, so sometimes the ability is greyed out.  Also, there’s a cooldown on using a charge, so the icon will also do the clock-refill animation.  That’s a lot going on for one small button on my UI.  I’m going to need something better than that.
• I’m not quite feeling the payoff that Pulverize gave in Cata.  I’m still stacking Lacerates, but I never get to spend them.  I’m sure I’ll get over it eventually, but I still miss that.
• Debuffs aren’t currently showing up on enemy nameplates using Tidy Plates:Threat Plates.  I relied on that to see what debuffs I needed to re-apply.  I’m not sure how or why that’s gone, but I sure miss it. [ EDIT – it’s a widget that I didn’t have enabled, because I recently transitioned computers.  See comments below.]

I got to run the Theramore scenario tonight.  It wasn’t the most in-depth storytelling, I didn’t quite feel like I knew what was going on, but it wasn’t bad – it was quick, fun, and a good new area to continue to learn the new Guardian format.

While I remember the invasion of floating necropolises, and I remember the elementals attacking Orgrimmar, and helping to liberate Echo Isles for the Darkspear clan, I’m not getting that sense of awesome wonder at the start of a world event.

BUT… it’s a scenario!  We never had such a thing before!  We always needed a tank, a healer, and at least 3 DPS, even for a paltry holiday boss.  Now, you can instantly hit group content with only 3 people, whatever their roles.

I have a very small guild.  There’s 6 of us that play regularly, and a couple more (3-4) that hop on sometimes.  We don’t have enough to raid.  So, we do casual stuff.

Tonight?  There were 3 of us online.  Only 3 of us.  We’d have to queue for a dungeon run, and hope a healer joined up to shorten the queue.  With a scenario, we were in, in seconds.  That’s really cool.  I got to see new content, and not have to sit in line to do it.  (At first, we only had 2 of us, and it was a 30-minute wait).

Overall, the scenario was entertaining, though not really challenging at my iLevel (390).  In fact, during one run, one of my friends had to drop out.  It doesn’t look like you can re-queue to pull in another person, so we finished it as a 2-man run.  It was no problem with a similarly geared hunter and my druid.

As a Horde, you get a “Spoils of Theramore” container, which looks like a lockbox.  Inside, you’ll find some fireworks, and maybe an item drop.  I got a helmet that looks like I skinned a boomkin, which I transmogged into immediately.

You’ll also get a toy item in the mail to remember your part in what apparently has some literate Alliance folks really up at arms.  I’m debating reading the book, only to know what in the world is supposedly going on.

Thanks for reading!

Reality, In Small Doses

This is going to come out a bit rambly – there’s a lot of things all jarring around inside my head, and I haven’t found a clean pattern to it yet. But, there’s definitely a few things I want to get out as a result of a lot of Twitter conversations I’ve seen, or recent blog posts I’ve looked at.

Lately I’ve been seeing quite a few blog posts about what difficult circumstances the writer faces, and how they took to MMORPGs as a way of dealing with things. Some of the posts have been earth-shatteringly moving, horribly similar to my own situations, or outright sad. The feeling that I’m getting from all of this is that we’ve faced a lot. All of us.

I’ve got similar stories, and I’ll probably get around to telling them sometime. I’ll admit that during Ambermist’s Meme I was certainly considering sharing, but I had simply too much going on in real life to come out and cope with this material as well. Things are almost nearly done being shaken up in my real life, and it looks like I’m making it through.

But, as Hestiah pointed out, the negativity is getting difficult. I want to look at things a little differently. I want to ask why gaming is giving us a place to relax, connect, and enjoy our time even if our lives, or our histories, seem to imply that we shouldn’t. So, I guess I’ll share at least a little bit about why it seems to work for me.

I prefer to deal with reality in small doses. I don’t seem to want to face everything all at once. I want to glance at it, walk away, come back later, check on it, procrastinate about it, and eventually go own up to it and get it over with. Without that “warming up to it” period, I generally feel overwhelmed and try to find some avoidance mechanism. I get highly annoyed when my day is so tightly scheduled that I don’t have a break (like running errands all day, or a day full of meetings). I actually need those momentary pauses to just… disconnect. I need to temporarily let go of everything I’m trying to carry around, and just calm down for a minute.

I know that my mind works a little differently than most people. My wife isn’t calm until she’s completed the list of tasks for the day. I feel calm when I get to concentrate. If I can become so engrossed in what I’m doing, my perception of my immediate environs vanishes and I feel overwhelmingly calm. This happens the best when I’m writing. Other choices that work are reading (blogs even work, please keep sending links!), writing code (yes, I’m a programmer), or playing music. MMO gaming, however, is just a little bit different. It provides that calming mechanism, but it also provides something else.

That “other thing” it provides, is company. I’m not alone. Now, to be clear, I don’t game with a lot of people. My guild, if you’d call it that, is a few real life friends and we run dungeons together, or go do our own independent thing – there’s not enough of us for a raid group, and with SW:TOR in the mix, lately people have been playing different games entirely and only chatting back and forth on Teamspeak (Dark ages, I know, but it’s not my server and it works well enough).

But, I do get to chat with people. I do get to interact with my friends. That imaginary bubble that holds the real world back for a while actually let some other people in, and I’m not all alone. That’s phenomenally huge. MMO Gaming allows for a communal escape. “Your life sucks?” “Yeah, mine too, let’s go kill some ogres and enjoy ourselves anyway.”

I get an opportunity to push a giant PAUSE button on reality, but it doesn’t freeze my friends. That’s pretty cool. Growing up, I’d never have imagined being able to have friends tag along into a well-crafted book at the same time as me. I could lend a book out, we could talk about it afterward, but we couldn’t ever enjoy it at the same time. Our temporary escapes were solitary. Watching a movie was probably the closest we could get, but you’re just sitting there, not participating. That’s not quite the same either.

The ability to communicate, to share the event, or to interact with actual people really made a huge difference. Suddenly, console games seemed incredibly lonely. I noticed something else about myself, though. I tend to seek out these like-minded virtual communities, and have done so since before MMORPGs existed.

I went to a college called RPI, where students developed a computer-mediated communication system called lily. This system was so fascinating to me in the fact that I was communicating with basically strangers, but they had similar backgrounds and interests as me, and it wasn’t the fractured populace just wildly yammering at each other. Knowledge of the system was predicated on either being associated with the college, or knowing someone on the system. This environment gave a similar feeling, the ability to provide a side-commentary on reality, without the immediate participation in reality. I could PAUSE things while I have a brief conversation with someone.

My recent foray into the world of blogging has been similar. The gaming blogosphere isn’t like the official Blizzard forums – people certainly come across as caring, genuine, intelligent, and interesting. Twitter allows those interactions to become conversations. This has been really fun. When it feels like a chore, or a duty, or… I dunno, a Molten Front daily, then I’ll probably take a pause from it.

(To hold a bubble like my daughter is doing, just get your hand wet first).

Sorting Out Our New Abilities

Start here.

With all the changes that have happened to our class, it’s going to take a while to get my action bars straightened out and then get my muscle memory up to snuff.  I wanted to get organized for once, instead of trying to hold everything in my head, I thought perhaps I should map out my skills in a way that would be more visual, and hopefully doesn’t miss anything.

For the first step, I wanted to get a map of the abilities.  Now, it’s going to look huge, and I apologize for that.  But, honestly, there’s 47 abilities, not counting racial abilities, or trinket activations.  There is plenty to assign to your measly 1 through = keys.

I decided to break the skills into 11 categories:

1. Attacks
2. Rage Generation
3. Offensive Cooldowns
4. Active Mitigation
5. Rage Spending
6. Threat Management
7. AoE
8. Utility
9. Cat Form
10. Healing
11. and the last group: WTF DO I USE THIS FOR?

Skill Map

My first category “Attacks” is something I was hoping would be easier to fill out, because the way I think of playing a Bear in Cata is a whole lot of attacking stuff.  With the addition of Rage Generation, however, we now have to manage generating our rage in order to spend it on Active Mitigation abilities.

I was a little liberal with my terminology of Active Mitigation.  I’m using it to mean any defensive cooldown ability, whether or not it consumes Rage, our primary resource.  Only Savage Defense and Frenzied Regeneration consume Rage these days, and the rest are just cooldowns that help our survivability.  You really should know those skills are around these days, because if you’re caught without enough rage for either “true” Active Mitigation skill, you should be using your free defensive cooldowns.  These need to be on your action bars!

Rage Spending was a category I was hoping would be more filled in as well, but there’s only one ability, Maul, which is now basically a Rage dump.  Unless I seriously overpower the content, I’m not likely to use this skill very often.  The loss of being able to hit an Active Mitigation cooldown in exchange for a few points of DPS is pretty sad, even if it is my personality type.

Threat Management used to consist of two skills, Growl, which boosts your threat equal to the highest threat on the target, and some other “holy crap we’re gonna die” button that is there if you’ve completely blown everything.  I can’t remember the name of that skill anyway, because I never pushed it – I always left it at the ready.  Now we’re down to just Growl.

We still have two AoE skills, Thrash and Swipe.  Thrash applies a bleed (see that red blob?  That’s supposed to be a blood drop!).  The red plus on Swipe is meant to show that it hits harder on opponents that have bleeds applied.  Given a choice, hit Thrash, then Swipe.  Lacerate (up in Attacks) also applies a bleed.

Those long streaky arrows from Lacerate and Thrash show that Mangle’s cooldown gets a chance to be reset when you push that skill.  Since Mangle is the only thing that makes Rage for you, you’ll want to use it often.  Hit the skills that let you use it more often.  As a sanity check, that now means you have a “priority” of Mangle > Thrash / Lacerate > Swipe.  Put very simply, YOU WILL SPAM MANGLE.  Sometimes you get to hit other buttons, which let you hit Mangle more.  If you’re not hitting Mangle, maybe try… um… hitting Mangle?  If you can’t hit Mangle, you can push another button, but the next button after that will definitely be Mangle.

Utilities became a very gross, over-concentrated category.  I’ll be writing a follow-up post that sorts out the Utilities better, because I’m going to need it to work out my new action bar mappings.  This catch-all category includes a battle rez, various CC abilities, movement CDs, interrupts, and for some reason it looks like I can actually push “track humanoids” as a button, instead of just a mini-map option.

Cat Form abilities are helpful to note, because if Heart of the Wild becomes a viable way to transition to Cat for some temporary DPS while not tanking, you’re going to want these on your cat action bars.  To better deal with the amazing shift in skill sets, I use the Bartender4 add-on.  You can assign multiple bars to swap based on your shapeshift.  In Cata, I used up two bars of buttons for Bear, and two bars for Cat.  In Mists, there’s a good chance I’m going to need 3 bars with all the new cooldowns available.

The Healing category has a couple skills marked with green dots – these are, in fact, HoTs – heals over time.  I wanted to identify those specifically because how you think about HoTs can be a little different than direct heals.  If you don’t need all of the direct heal, you may not want to cast it for efficiency reasons.  If you toss a HoT out, you may get less overheals as a result.  I’m no healer though – so don’t take my word for it.  Most of the skills here will also take you out of Bear form (unless you’re using Nature’s Swiftness skill), so don’t put these directly on your action bars.  If you use Nature’s Swiftness, you can macro it with Healing Touch.

Finally… the WTF DO I USE THIS FOR? category.

Now, to be fair, I know when I should use Wrath and Moonfire – when I’m doing dailies in Org and want to hear the cool sound effect without chasing down the pigs, or the stealthed food thieves.  I’ve never used Hurricane other than making a mess on my screen.  I’ve heard of bears using it to pull aggro on a pack of mobs, but I just never tried, namely because the targeting reticule, and channeling aspects are cumbersome to deal with.  I wouldn’t make a good boomkin, despite all that gear I’ve collected.

I have also used Teleport:Moonglade while leveling – it’s a close enough flight to Org that it makes getting back from certain places easier if your hearthstone is on cooldown, and, of course, you’re Horde.  Between scrolls of recall and the reduced cooldown on my hearth from guild perks, I don’t use it anymore.

Symbiosis, like everyone else, deserves its own write-up.  I’m mostly concerned what the UI looks like for the people involved.  We can argue about the skills all day, but the fact remains that most casual players aren’t going to know what to do with a new skill, let alone map it to their action bars and actually use it in a 5-man.  Unless it shows up as one of those “Extra Action Buttons” like Dream in the Madness fight, casual non-druids aren’t going to use their new skills, period.

Enjoy the map – and as always, feedback appreciated.

 

 

MOP Date Announced!

The Mists of Panderia beta looked like this early on, huge stripes of terrain were missing.

Just in case you haven’t heard, World of Warcraft’s “Mists of Panderia” has announced a release date of September 25th, 2012.  This is the kind of news that happens while I’m sleeping or trying to get to work in the morning, apparently, so there’s not much of a chance for me to write a post on the bleeding edge here.  I’m sure you’ve heard already, but now I don’t have to feel like I’m hiding information from you.

As you may have noticed, things have been really quiet around this blog lately – that’s due to a couple of reasons.  The first is that I’m looking to leave my job of 11 years and start a new company.  When I do have some time to myself, I’m usually doing research, or talking to the new business partners, or busy stressing out about what I’m about to do to myself and my family.

Secondly, when I am gaming these days, I’m just playing catch-up.  My “guild” is basically a few real life friends, and they migrate from game to game as they collectively agree on what to do next.  Their current obsession is SW:TOR.  I’m trying, but I just don’t like it.  The storyline is irksome, it’s always serious, and as noted in another post, the overall timing of the game isn’t very conducive to how often I get to play.  My guildies have been level 50 (the max level) for months now, I’m still lagging behind at a lowly level 32 on my main, and haven’t even dared roll an alt yet.  I’m sure there’s a SW:TOR post-mortem coming from me.  In Diablo, I play intensely for about an hour at a time, but I’m still in normal mode at the start of Act III, so I don’t feel like there’s much I can add to the conversations on it at the moment.  You kill stuff, it’s fun, then you hit a wall and go to the auction house.  Not much to talk about, really.  When it’s not seeming fun, don’t play it.  Easy enough!

With MOP’s date announced, I’m now interested in getting back into WoW, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to be reasonably paced with it.  The new business is definitely taking a lot of my spare cycles, so there isn’t much time.

There’s a few things I want to get done before the expansion lands:

1. Review all of the new skills for my main – this will certainly take a while, and probably generate a post or two.
2. Map out the best allocation of keybindings and macros so I can play easily.  I’ll try to share my thoughts on this process, but that could be really lengthy.
3. Get re-accustomed to tanking, which will probably have to be on the Beta so my muscle-memory gets attached to the new skills/rotations.
4. As for live, I just want to clear out my inventory – I usually stockpile hordes of crap for no good reason.  As a druid, I’m actually maintaining gear for any spec possible, which all just sits in my bank.  Making money would be a good idea, learning as many of the remaining glyphs for Inscription would probably help, although I’m a little afraid Scribes are getting one of those “consolation gifts” of a couple pieces of gold for your previously useful, hard-earned abilities.  You know, like when they took keys out of the game – you made a couple gold, but some of those you were very proud of!
5. Get that T13 hat to drop, but in my case that means dealing with LFR, which I couldn’t care less about at this point.

So, there’s a lot to do these days, both in-game and out.

Forced Digital Migrations

 

My MobileMe account has expired.  This bothers me, a lot.  I was paying for an online service and was content with the quality of the service I was receiving.  This transition isn’t happening because I decided to quit the service.  Apple (the service provider) decided to re-architect their services into the “iCloud” moniker, and make them be free.

I don’t want free.  I actually feel better paying for a service.  I was predominantly using MobileMe for the purposes of email.  It makes sense to me that I should have spam-free, ad-free email, and that such a service costs money.  I never wanted to move to a Gmail account for the simple reason that it’s free.  Google pays for server maintenance and upkeep and gains profit by automatically parsing your online data (emails, in this case) to deliver targeted advertisements to you.  I don’t want people reading my emails.  I don’t want code scanning my emails.  Since this seems like a higher quality of life than provided by the “free” situations, I’m happy to pay for that service.

I believe Apple’s new concept is that some portion of the profit of their hardware sales gets divided off to fund the iCloud data storage facilities.  This basically means that Apple will continue to make their own products obsolete rather quickly, and you’ll feel compelled to buy the new one because now they have your data, and if you don’t upgrade you’ll lose all of your email, calendars, contact information, and music collection.  While this is conjecture on my part, I can’t see how else they cover the costs and provide ad-free operation.  Since I’d rather avoid being pummeled with ads in the future, paying the subscription rate makes it seem more like a long-lasting agreement.

Also, paying for the MobileMe subscription made me feel like a customer, which means there should be some accessibility to customer support.  If I’m having problems with a free product or service, I don’t really expect there to be any support available.  When it comes to a fundamental communication system in this day and age, I want to feel secure that I can ask for help when something is going wrong.  Paying a subscription makes me feel like that’s the case.  With it being free, I now have to have the device(s) under AppleCare to think I’m going to get any customer service.

(copyright Blizzard Entertainment, Inc.)

How does this possibly relate to gaming?  Well, a while back Blizzard made me transition my WoW account to a Battle.Net account.  This was probably a smooth transition for you, if you went through this, because your account was probably active when the transition fell.

In my case, I quit WoW for a span of time.  That’s when Battle.Net dropped on everyone.  When I came back to restart my WoW account, I couldn’t do it until I had it as a Battle.Net account.  Well, I couldn’t access the WoW account because it was inactive.  This attempt to get back into the game was not an easy process, and there were certainly times where I thought, “I’m jumping through all of these hoops just so I can pay them money again?  Why am I doing this?”

SW:TOR’s forced server migrations affected one of my friends in a very similar fashion.  He had already quit SW:TOR in favor of Diablo 3.  He very conscientiously maintains a monthly gaming budget, so a game purchase means dropping subscription games for an equivalent amount of time.  Because SW:TOR was going to delete his non-active character once the server shut down, he renewed his subscription just to make sure the transition went smoothly.  At least he knew it was coming – Blizzard didn’t give me a heads-up.

During the SW:TOR server migration, my friends had multiple alts, and wanted to bring over all of their alts.  Totally understandable.  Except, they queued up their transfers.  Thanks to the unique name requirement in game, having all of these players on the same server means that sometimes, their name was taken.  Ok, that’s understandable.  A bit annoying, not the coolest thing ever, but I get it.  What went wrong, however, was that the names were attached to different toons after the migration. For example, two characters, Jed the Jedi Knight and Smug the Smuggler, are queued for transfer.  After the transfer, you get Jed the Smuggler and Smug the Jedi Knight.

They didn’t test this before they launched it?  Surely they must have thought people had alts!  I mean, the primary point of the game is the leveling experience, which means to see another experience you have to make an alt.

Apple’s recent forced migration wasn’t any better.  If anything, it was actually worse as it pertains to the iTunes store.  As the years go by, I’m already inevitably forced to migrate my email address, whether it’s a change of job, a change of ISP, whatever.  My email addresses don’t last forever.  I thought the @mac.com address would last, but alas, they end-of-lifed that a while ago, when MobileMe replaced the @mac system.  At least the address was grandfathered in.  So, my iTunes account was under an email address that I was forced to abandon, but it was still the id on the store.  I was able to attach a functioning email address as the primary contact address, but I couldn’t change the ID.

Eventually, Apple decided that didn’t make sense, and made some new requirements.  Every ID had to be an AppleID, and part of that requirement was that the ID is a valid email address.  That sort of makes sense, no reason to force people to continue to use an abandoned email address as a user ID.  There was one little catch to this whole process, you can’t convert to an existing AppleID, and every MobileMe and iCloud account counts as an AppleID.  This means that my primary, personal account can’t be used as my store account, and there was no way to merge my purchased assets to my existing AppleID accounts.

In order to get all this to work, I had to go to their competitor (Google) and get a free email address so I could have a valid email that wasn’t already an AppleID.  Way to go, guys!  That’s a lot like saying you can’t unlock your Battle.Net assets without an Origin ID.

Speaking of Battle.Net, I’m adding my BattleTag, Khuruuk#1578, to the about page.  I’ll accept any and all polite requests.

How could any of this be made easier?

• Assume your customers like you.
  • They may already have the type of account you want them to have.
  • They are your customers, they’re probably paying you money or already have.  Treat them like that!
  • Be especially kind to returning customers.  They decided you weren’t good enough to keep paying, so they walked away.  Don’t make anything harder for them to give you their money again, they already walked out on you once.
• Offer reimbursements for change of terms.
  • I agreed to pay for a service with the given terms.  Changing the terms means I should receive notification of those change of terms, with the option of opting out.  In the case of Apple, iCloud was available LONG before my MobileMe subscription ran out.  They didn’t give me that money back.  Instead, they kept the MobileMe service running for that span of time.  There was a free, equivalent system already in place, and because of the yearly billing cycle, I had already paid for an outdated system.
  • SW:TOR, to their credit, botched a patch release a while back and gave everyone affected a free day of service.  While I was still under my 30-day evaluation period, they even gave that day of service to me.  This was a really nice thing to do, certainly above and beyond Apple’s above treatment.

Thanks for reading!

Little Guy Run

Daddy made me wear this.

As a parent who plays games, sometimes I make mistakes.  It happens, and honestly I think every parent does something they wish they hadn’t done.  Where gaming and parenting collide, however, I think is usually too funny not to share.

I think the first time I heard my daughter say “Orgrimmar” at the dinner table I spat my food out.  I wasn’t expecting that one!

I try to not set a bad example, and tend to only play when the kids are either asleep or napping.  As a word of advice, when the kid is old enough to get out of their bed when nap is over, they will catch you playing.  Don’t play during their naps.  You will get caught.

When my daughter first caught me playing World of Warcraft, I showed her how you push the arrow keys and that makes the little guy run around.  I think I was just running dailies in Org, nothing spectacular, but she was having a great time watching, so I just let her sit with me for a bit.  From then on, she referred to the game as “Little Guy Run.”  And to be fair, that’s really what most of the game is:

Need to go somewhere?  Little guy runs.

Standing in poop in a fight?  Run, Little guy, run.

Mobs coming after you for digging up bones in their backyard?  BEAR KILLS ALL.  Yeah, that didn’t go over so well.  We returned to more peaceful activities.

She enjoyed touring through all my mounts, but mostly loved the Preserved Holly turning my time-dragon into a flying reindeer.

She loves all the non-combat pets, but I think Mr. Chilly holds a special place in her heart.  She’s pretty fond of most of the druid forms, although doesn’t really like to settle on any specific form.  “Turn into a cat.  No, the other cat.  Now turn into a bat.  Go back to a bear.  Now the other cat.”  I’m sure she’s going to love the new Glyph of Random Haircolor coming in Mists.

As for things to do in the game, she’s pretty happy watching the cooking dailies.  She likes a lot of the exploration, and I went on a few pet-purchasing trips with her (I was never going back to Netherstorm without some serious encouragement).  As you can probably guess, she’s caught me playing quite a few times now.

But of all the times we’ve done peaceful activities in Azeroth, the one piece that I feel sorta bad about is that I taught my four year old how to fish.  Not because she was really interested in it, but because I had to level fishing and I really hate fishing in this game.  So… I got a helper.  I’d cast, and she’d watch the bobber and then click if it moved.  I leveled way too much fishing from her doing all the work.  The real kicker there is that I was leveling it up so I could make Agi food for my feral.  Turns out I’m also a scribe – I could make Fortune Cookies the whole time.

So… what about you?  What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve done with your child while playing Little Guy Run, or any MMO?

Glyph of Bunnies

(It’s the glyph on the left.)

It’s not exactly Glyph of Bunnies, but us Druids got an… odd… new glyph on the Mists of Panderia beta.  As you can see from the tooltip, it allows us to “befriend” a woodland creature which follows us around for an hour.  The idea is that you get a cute non-combat pet.  I’m pretty sure I can’t pet-battle it, but I’m not level 90 to double-check that.  If you’ve been reading anything around here, you can probably guess that this isn’t a glyph I’ll be packing once things go live.

As a bear/cat/feral/guardian, I’m pretty sure I’m not the kind of guy some sweet, innocent little doe is going to want to hang out with, even if I shoot them full of druidy friendliness.  I’m pretty sure devastating villages with a little white dove following me is only going to get applause from fans of Mission:Impossible 2.  No… I need to find little forest critters that are my kind of style.

There’s a really unique place northwest of Thunder Bluff in Mulgore.  If you haven’t been there before, you’re in for a real treat.  It’s way off the map, you’d never bother going there if no one told you about this bizarre occurrence out there.  My friends and I are still trying to piece together the reference that’s being made, to date the best I’ve got is it’s maybe a nod to an old pen-n-paper RPG named “Wabbit Wampage.”

Out here, the forest animals mutate into armed combatants that go kill each other.  Yes, I’m serious.  I love this place!  There are three tribes, rabbits, prairie dogs, and mice.  Sometimes none of them are mutated, sometimes the bunnies go killer, sometimes it’s the other guys.

With my fancy new glyph in hand, I thought I’d go see what kind of friends I could find, that may actually stick around for my typical behaviors.

Axe Bunny

First up:  a rabbit.  Not a great screenshot, and that’s one big rabbit.  For some reason they were especially sized up when I got there.  They come in a few colors, and the axe looks like it was stolen from an Orgrimmar caravan.  It’s blade has a lot of leading-edge spikes, and a painted, Thunder Bluff looking handle.  As you’d imagine, he hops around.

“I cut you.”

This cute little guy sports a single-spike helmet and wields a small knife.  He likes to wash his face a lot, which results in him rubbing the knife all over his face like a psychopath.  Looks like we’re stepping up in the world.  Sadly, I happen to know for fact that there’s one better, it just took me a while to catch him:

My new friend!

Yep.  He’s wearing a skull for a helmet, and the jaw’s cracked open.  He’s dual-weilding two double-barrel flintlock guns.  I think we have a winner!  He’s even very animated, pacing back and forth waving his guns wildly, and pausing to sniff the air.  This little guy is awesome.

Now, before you head off to Stonetalon Pass to grab your own, there’s a few things you need to know:

1. Sometimes they change back to normal, tiny, cute form while you’re casting on them.
2. You do have to select the critter, then cast the spell.
3. Once they’re marked as your minion (see above screenshots), they follow you around, only if you’re on foot!
4. Mounting makes them vanish.
5. Swift flight form maybe didn’t make it vanish, but once I flew over the cliff I lost the critter.
6. You can still make this enjoyable and show it off a bit, by walking him down into Thunder Bluff, and taking the zep back to Orgrimmar.  Since that zeppelin ride doesn’t phase-out and show the Indiana Jones dotted path on the map, you can bring your new friend all the way to Orgrimmar, even without mounting or flying, and it doesn’t take as long as walking.

Even the mice in Org are mean.

Sadly, some other weird effect knocked him off of me shortly after this screen shot.  Some spell effect came flying out of nowhere and healed me, which in turn made my little bandito mouse vanish.

I hope you enjoy seeing what appropriate friends the new glyph has to offer, and maybe you won’t instantly dismiss it.

Please post a comment if there are more stylishly vile critters out there!