In my previous guild, people just hated the Faction Champions fight.  I can understand their frustration.  They viewed it as a PVP fight in a PVE game.  I will admit my first impression was somewhat similar.  As I’ve grown in the game, I’ve found that overall it is one of my FAVORITE encounters in this expansion. 

Let me explain why after the break. Read the rest of this entry »

It has been brought to my attention that many of my posts here are pretty subjective.  Well, I know that in my heart of hearts that its a true challenge to provide accurate statistical analysis.  However after spending the last two weeks reading up, I wanted to present to you with an in depth analysis of Azerothian Math. 

I’ve consulted with the Azerothian Tinfoil Hat Society in an effort the gain a statistical view of the math within the game of WoW.  The ATHS has presented deeply inspiring works such as Pallies QQ Moar: A mathmatecal proof of Blizzard’s hate of Pallies and Do it From Behind: An in depth Rogue Analysis, but they are most famous for their work on Blue Man Group: A trend analysis of Blue posts related to Blizzard’s hate of “pure” classes. 

WARNING:  The following post contains theory crafting as well as mathmatical theorems.  Read at your own risk. Read the rest of this entry »

So I was sitting there this past weekend on Friday or Saturday figuring I’d play a little WoW.  Most people I think kind of skim past the launcher screen, but I thought I’d stop and read it.  My PC isn’t the fastest thing in the world, but hey… it is what it is.  Until my wife wins the lottery, I’m pretty well stuck with what I have. 

So I was sitting there reading and saw that Blizzard had $5 copies of the base game for the weekend…  Ruh Roh Raggy…. um… Well see I’m an altoholic.  And I was just bitching about how I didn’t have enough support structure right?  Well…. see… I kind of made the mistake of mentioning it in Guild chat that I was thinking of picking up a copy and testing out dual boxing as a nice easy way to level some alts quickly to level 60.

Lets face it… I’m bored.  Moving to a new guild came at a price.  The price was…well… everything is on farm.  So our raiding takes 1.5 hours.  Done.. out for the week.  Ulduar is off the table.  And we’re working on TOGC, but only one day a week.  So ok… fine… our raiding take 4 hours a week, but we haven’t been very consistent on TOGC.  Plus I have this desire to get at least ONE support character to a position where they can help my main. 

Little did I know the wave I’d start…. Read the rest of this entry »

It has been an interesting few weeks.  I was accused of being a real pro the other day in a raid and to be honest.. it felt good.  I’ve been quiet on purpose.  I’ve had a lot to say, but to be honest, I wanted to give people I knew a bit of time to adjust… pick a direction and decide what they wanted to do with the game.

I’ve picked my path and thus far I’m not regretting it.  For those who have been watching, you know I jumped from Alliance to Horde and swapped servers.  $55 later (ouch), I found myself in a guild formed by some friends of mine I see once or twice a month.  So its a guild largely comprised of people who know each other.  Lets take a few minutes to dwell down what I’ve experienced and some of the surprises I’ve seen. Read the rest of this entry »

Friday was one of those blessid days.  Why you ask?  Because we got mail!!!!

Now… I actually have a decent amount of people who read what I write, but comments are kind of few, and emails are kind of slow some days, but Edgar… we love you man.  Since you wrote in to ask me about a topic I hold dear, you get to be answered all personal and such :p

Edgar wrote:

Hey Starman, I’m a new reader of your Casual Raid Leader blog, so I’m not sure if you’ve addressed this before but I saw an article on WoW.com that dealt with the topic “How to coach your raid members“. I was interested in knowing what you felt, knew and could say about the topic in general, not just what was said in the article.

Regards,
Edgar

Thanks Edgar.  I actually hadn’t even noticed that article to be honest… though I’m not even sure how I missed it.  Its not a bad article, but… I feel it glanced over a few key points.  Lets pop the hood and see what we’ve got. Read the rest of this entry »

If I get one and only claim to fame for this expansion, its that I was blessed enough to coin the phrase, Children of Wrath.  Its one that spawned a TON of posts across the Blog Azeroth community, but lets take a bit of time almost a year out to do a little retrospective.  This was the first post that I did, that WowInsider took notice and was nice enough to crash my site over.  Its a post of mine that still gets hits to this day. 

When I did the original post, I was focused on the things that a Child of Wrath missed.  Now… almost a year in the future, I want to take a look back and see what their world is like.

This is probably one of my more interactive topics folks.  I would highly encourage anyone who has grown up in Wrath to post on this, whether it be to share your perspective, or to show me where you blogged on it.  This is something that really fascinates me, and to be honest, I’m really curious what life has been like for someone who started the game after Wrath of the Lich King was released. 

But for now, lets take a deeper dive on my perspectives on how life has been for the Children of Wrath…  I’m not going to go into the world of PVP servers, but stick with our care bear PVE servers. Read the rest of this entry »

Not that long ago as part of a large amount of frustation on my part, I vented on what I viewed as a huge issue with healing in Wrath.  Now… I was flipping through some incoming traffic and came across this very interesting article over at Procrastination Amplification by Scrusi.  They brought up a very interesting point. 

In my original article, I felt that a great deal of the reason that healing had burned so many healers out was the sheer difficulty.  Scrusi contends that difficult encounters would wake healers up and actually there’s a great deal of boredom involved with healing.  Ok… I’m 3 weeks into  my horde transformation.  Lets see what I’ve learned. Read the rest of this entry »

Sure… I’m a small site, but I write for a reason.  Till now, I’ve been ignoring a portion of my audience.  As of today, we’re going to take a deeper dive into this audience. 

First let me say, I spend a lot of time dealing with this particular audience.  Well actually I don’t.. I spend a couple of seconds every few days whiping their comments off of my pages.  Yes… spam.  Glorious Spam.  Lets take a look at what my spam tells me shall we?

Read the rest of this entry »

In the wake of changing guilds, I wanted to take a bit of time to sit down and really think about what happened and see the ripple effects before I really talked about what I learned. Its now been over two weeks since I left my previous guild. Since I left, my previous guild has become a shell of its former self. A lot of very good players have been scattered to the wind. Some of them went places I’d rather they hadn’t. Some of them have been left to drift in a quagmire not sure where to go. Others have picked new directions.

Lets start with something I’ve learned about burn out. Just a fair warning… if you’ve ever seen a bear wall… this is going to look an aweful lot like one. Read the rest of this entry »

So I was sitting there last night looking at new trinkets.  I had finally gotten up in the 60 badge range on Emblems of Triumph and wanted to look at getting a shiny new trinket.  I went over, bought a nice one and finally… after all the blood sweat and tears got my hands on a trinket upgrade.

I’ve been using the same iLVL 200 trinkets forever.  Now granted… for bear tanks I’m pretty sure they are about the best of the best.  They have mountains of stamina coupled with dodge or the shielding effect that you get from the “Black Heart”.  They are great trinkets.  I’ve got no complaints there.

So I went and bought a nice trinket upgrade.  I was talking with a friend of mine about my Emblems of Triumph purchases.  I was pretty excited.  I only had one more purchase and I’d be all done I told him.  I figured I’d pick up the idol they had and then I could start buying off set items.  He then promptly whispered me, “Don’t need any T9?  That stuffs just vendor bait”

Wait… run that by me again?  I looked over the T9.5 stuff and I knew it took a token to buy… did I miss a vendor?  Oh my god… I did… There’s a T9 vendor you can buy the T9 stuff with no extra token… *headdesk*

I’ve wasted friggin badges already hunting things like a ring upgrade etc.. I could have had 4 pieces of T9 by now… So I promptly ran back to the badge vendor… sold back my shiny new trinket and ran over to the T9 vendor to buy a couple of really nice upgrades.  I’ve been dying for a shoulder upgrade forever… yeah… silly me.  Well at least I wasn’t alone.  The other bear tank in the guild didn’t know either… so we’d both wasted a bunch of badges.

Oh well.. call me in another 200 badges once I’m done buying all my upgrades ok???