Casual Raid Leader

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

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?

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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. (more…)

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???

I find myself in one of those introspective moods this week.  That comes with good reason.  First and foremost let me say that the last week has been filled with turmoil largely caused by myself.  The really depressing thing is that I try very hard some times to try to avoid causing major strife and pain for people and almost like clockwork, BOOM… mass chaos.

Last week Thursday I announced I was leaving my existing guild.  Its not an easy thing to do.  In my position, for better or worse, a lot of people place their hopes and successes on your shoulders.  Their game in many ways revolves around your involvement and your continued involvement. (more…)

Dunno… lately I’m having a hard time getting excited about the next expansion.  I’ve seen a good number of people who have gotten extremely excited.  They’re looking at the new widgets coming.  They are looking at the new way that gear will work.  They are looking at reforging. 

Me…. I’m just filled with apathy about the whole damned thing.  I’m not entirely sure why.  Maybe its because I’m just not going to have the time to dedicate to the game.  Maybe its because I seriously doubt I’ll be able to raid in the next expansion.  Maybe its because… I’ve just played the game too damned long. (more…)

Tanks… Tanks have been treated very well in this expansion.  That’s my take on it and I’m sticking to it.  Are we still kind of reactionary?  Yeah in a way, but overall, the struggles we went through in Burning Crusade are largely gone.  We can happily trundle out there and tank our merry hearts out and not feel like we’re screwed… or under powered.  Blizzard went a long way toward making tanking FUN.  Yes… Fun I said.

Yes.. I tank with my face.  My job is to beat my face on the bad man’s big left toe repeatedly till he says… “Ouch… a hang nail” and proceeds to try to pick my off his toe.  Healers though… somehow their problem seems more dramatic. (more…)