You are currently browsing the monthly archive for April, 2009.
This is cool in terms of the reliability and security of the technology, not cool for some of the ways it could be used.
Vault of Archavon has become a lot less fun to PuG.
Emalon, the new boss, is a step up in difficulty from Archavon, the encounter require more focus and awareness due to the Lightning Nova (even if is no different from Loken in Hall of Lightning) and high dps in order to kill the charged add before he wipes the raid.
By their intrinsic nature, VoA raids are composed by all manners of people, from veteran raiders to people in quest greens and M&S (as a certain goblin calls them), and with the exception of the first category, they are incapable of delivering what is needed, so most of the PuGs I have been in go for Archavon first and then have a few attempts at Emalon, or like the last one I was in, had 1 attempt at Emalon before moving to Archavon.
The issue is that I don’t want to get saved to a PuG raid by killing Archavon and then being unable to go back and have a serious attempt at the new boss, since I don’t need badges (especially the Heroism ones), don’t need any of the gear Archavon drops while I’d like to have a shot at a few tier 8 pieces and the Furious Gladiator ones.
At this point, I have to refuse to join any Archavon kill until the last possible minute before reset, in the hope of getting in a PuG with enough decent people to kill Emalon, and I’m sure this situation will change the dynamics in VoA PuGs once more people will be in the same frame of mind.
There are websites that, althought with an interesting content, I hate visiting due to the horrible layout and the sheer volume of banners and advertising. I tended to avoid these in the past and lose interesting articles and discussions but fortunately there is a solution now thanks to a company called arc90 and a small tool/bookmarklet called Readability.
All you need to do to set it up is visit the main Readability page, select your settings and drag the bookmarklet to your browser toolbar.
While browsing normally, if you come across an “irritating” website, just click on the Readability button in your toolbar and you will get the main text on that page formatted as you chose at the beginning.
World and BG PvP movies are not really interesting but the editing can change that.
Weird shit the Equus serie on Warcraft Movies, but I like it, especially the first one, check it out here.
Another Rogue movie worth watching is The Six Silent Shadows by Bizzlesnaf (hefty dowload at almost 1 Gb but worth it in my opinion).
What about you? What are your favorite WoW movies?
Last March Gary Gygax passed away, today we say another sad goodbye to Dave Arneson.
Thank you guys for the many memories of nights spent with friends your game gave me.
Yesterday I listed 5 useful addons for Rogues, today I’m dedicating this post to NeedToKnow (from now on I’ll refer to it as NTK).
When you first install it and log into the game you’ll see three gray bars in the top-right quadrant of your screen.
To get to the options for the addon, go to the Interface options of the main menu and clicking on the AddOns tab you’ll see the NTK name in the list to the left of the options window
In the window you can choose how many groups of bars you want active and how many bars each group has. NTK allows you to have 4 groups of bars with a maximum of 6 bars for each group.
You can also choose between different textures for the bars. I don’t use SharedMedia but if I remember correctly it should work with NTK.
The configuration is done by right clicking on the bar and selecting the options from the dropdown menu.
In order to assign a bar to an ability you need to select “Choose buff/debuff to time”; once done that, a dialog window will open where you’ll have to enter the buff/debuff name, exactly as it in its tooltip. Click Accept and the bar will show the buff name. Once you’ve done this you just need to specify whether it’s a buff or a debuff
and which unit the addon needs to monitor.
Depending on what you want to monitor you might want to selct whether it is only an ability you cast (as a rogue I do this for Rupture) or if you want to keep an eye on an ability that is not yours (for example I could track Faerie Fire on a mob, which could be cast by any druid in my party/raid).
It is possible to modify the lenght and the thickness of the bars in a group by dragging the bottom right corner and change the colour of each bar by clicking on the colored square in the menu.
Once all the configuration is done you need to lock the addon for it to start working.
Here is my set up in combat:
I really like NTK for the easy configuration, customization and flexibility and as an added bonus for the small memory footprint (75k on my machine).
Also, it is not specifically coded with one class in mind so everybody could use it.
NugEnergy: is simply a movable bar showing my energy. The interesting thing is that I can put markers in the bar at different values to make it easier to see when I have enough energy for a certain ability.
NeedToKnow: I think I have tried all the timers add-ons and I finally settled on this to track my abilities (Slice and Dice, Rupture and Hunger for Blood). Very easy to configure: right click on a bar, choose between a few options and you are ready to go.
EasyPoisons: automatic Poisons buyer. Needs to be setup once at the beginning with the quantity for each poison and from then onwards every time you visit a poison vendor it automatically restock them.
evlReminders: Rule-based automated reminders for commonly forgotten tasks. It basically puts my normal weapons icons in the middle of my screen when I have 5 minutes left on my poisons, and it shades them red when my poisons have expired.
Stunwatch: It is buggy and not working as it should 100% of the times but it still is the best addon I could find to track rogues stuns across multiple targets without being too bloated (NECB, I’m looking in your direction).
Lots of WoW bloggers are picking up the 31DBBB from ProBlogger; I am too but in a lighter way, I mean I’ll look at each day task but I reserve the right to decide what I’ll use and what I’ll leave aside.
The first task, which is write an elevator pitch for your blog will be done at the end of the 31 days; I haven’t worked on this for a long time so I’m going to see where my writing is going before deciding on the elevator pitch.
I’m finally getting round to add a proper blogroll, starting with fellow rogues. If I have missed anyone, please let me know and I’ll add the site.
I am still around, mainly reading other blogs and trying to decide what to do with my rogue because a couple of weeks ago I left my guild, and now I find myself re-evaluating my goals in WoW.
Some kind of explanation (wall of text crits you for over 9000)
Mainly as an exercise in reinforcing the fact that I have done the right thing (because there are times when I log and I sit there staring at the screen with no raids planned, no green text in my chat and I feel a bit lost).
The guild had already undergone a reduction in numbers just before Christmas, where our raid leader, two officer and few others left due to a mix of personal reason and conflict with the remaining officers all in the space of a few days, and we kept losing one player here, one player there over the course of the following weeks.
This situation, compounded by non-existent recruitment, set the guild raiding plans back since we were unable to consistently field two 10-men raids, never mind a decent 25 men.
Things started to pick up again with new people joining, a few rerolling, and by the beginning of March we cleared all the heroic content plus Sarth+1D, and we were working on getting the Twilight Duo achievement.
First issue: being a relatively new guild, we had a poll on raiders availability and the officers picked the raiding days with the most people available, trying to make sure most of us was able to sign up for at least two raids out of three (the guild doesn’t have any minimum attendance required) with fixed days for set instances. Once we cleared content and started working on Sarth 2D, the “Dragons night” was moved from its usual day to another one because the officer who usually posts the raid cannot attend the original chosen night (and he really needs to be present!), even if that was the day for the two 10 men run because fewer people were usually available.
Second issue (and how could this one be missing!): It all started at our first Sapphiron kill in 25 men, when the Raid leader and officers said they would like to overrule our set way of loot distribution for the quest item for the Malygos key on that kill and the subsequent one. At the end of the day i thought it made sense to give the first couple to people (read: raid leaders) who are more or less always available; at least we know we can attempt Maly regularly. The problem was that for the next five kills, the quest item was assigned by the loot master to specific raiders without any explanation.
At the same time I have seen riders pressurised (bullied is too strong a word) in passing on substantial upgrades to benefit…… oh, the same people again.
Three weeks ago on our calendar appeared a new note: on the night of our ten men runs, one of the two teams will be the one attempting the undying achievement and who’s going? …. oh, the same people again.
I have to deal with enough conflict at work where I have to make things work no matter what, so I took the easy way out. Without noise or fits or accusations I said goodbye and left.
