Jed's Corner of WoW Shenanigans

What's in a name?

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 16:16:00 +0000

I was reading something in the WoW subreddit(as I often do) and I ran across an interesting question: How do you come up with a name for your characters? This is such an interesting question because everyone has different reasons for why they use a certain name. Some choose names from other games, some just use the in game random name generator until they find a name they like, and some don't care about their character names and pick random things. Each person is different and while some names are completely unoriginal, they probably mean something to the person who rolled that character. As for me, I have a long and weird process I go through when I pick a name for characters.

I once made the joke that you can tell when in my life people met me by what they call me. If you call me by my real name we probably met in high school. If you know me as Jedi Optimus, we most likely met when I was in college and very active on several online message boards and I also played many online FPS games where that was the handle I used. Many a noob cursed that name in anger as I shot them ingame. If you know me as Jedem, we most likely met in 2005 when I first started playing WoW and I used that name for my very first character, a warrior. I eventually changed servers and classes but the first character I rolled on Ursin was a mage named Jedem. If you refer to me as Izak, you probably raided with me in BC when my pally sadly became my raiding main. Now Jed, well if that's what you know me as and you have never been in my guild, you probably met me in Wrath when I first started blogging. Of course if you have ever been in my guild regardless of when, you eventually know me as Jed.

When it comes to my characters I tend to take some time when it comes to thinking up their names. Some take me weeks to figure out what I want to name them and some take me minutes. For my mage, Jedem, I had started using it when I played Final Fantasy 11. When I made the move to WoW I liked the name so I brought it with me and named my first character Jedem. Now that character was a warrior and not a mage because I wanted to try my hand at an easy class to play since I had come from FF11 where everything was super difficult to play. Eventually I rolled a mage and decided I liked it enough that when I moved to my current server(Ursin) I rolled my first character: a mage named Jedem. Eventually as more people joined my guild, Jedem was shortened to Jed by new players and I've been stuck with the name since.

Now obviously my mage will have a lot of history behind his name, being my main in my heart.(not always in raids) Some names don't have as much meaning behind them until I've played them a while and the character earns the name. Now some of my character names aren't as serious or have a history behind them. Some are meant to be silly and playful. When I first created an alt of a certain class I would try to give it a slightly serious name but when I created a new alt of the same class, that would go out the window. Sometimes silly names make an appearance. My latest alt is my new human warlock that I named CptSerious after the nickname of the captain of the Chicago Blackhawks hockey team. He is my second warlock alt and so there are no rules for his name. When I made my horde panda monk I had already leveled an alliance panda monk to 90 so the horde one was named something light. I chose to go with SteveJabbs because it was a funny name and seemed to fit.

Sometimes I get on a streak of names that are somewhat related to each other. I named several of my alts after famous generals. I have a Winfield, Rhommel, Bonapartte, Stonewall, Wellesley, Moltke, and Cauthonn. If you recognize all of those names you get a gold star! History nerds unite! I have never named an alt anything stupid like XxArthasxX or DKLAWLS or anything stupid like that. Here's hoping that I never do! So that is a little peak into my mind when it comes to character names. Some are serious, some are funny, and some are slightly silly. In the end they are all me.

Plight of the low pop server

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 02:45:00 +0000

I have been on my server since 2005 when it was first launched and in that time my server has gone from being a medium population server (ever so briefly) to being a low population server less than a year after going live. Since then, it has remained a low pop server. While at the time it wasn’t a big deal, the population on the server has steadily declined. During Vanilla, before paid transfers were implemented, most people rolled on a server and stayed on that server until they either stopped playing or found a reason to start over on a different realm. If you reached level 60 on a character, people tended to stay on that server because it was such a pain to re-level on a new server. Once paid transfers were introduced the barrier to leaving your server was removed. Players were free to transfer their characters to new servers to play with friends/coworkers/raiding guilds/etc.

Of course this didn’t affect the larger realms since the higher population numbers meant they could afford to lose some people to other servers without it affecting the overall population. Unlike larger servers, the smaller servers suffered because the realms couldn’t afford to lose so many people. As new people began playing WoW, most would pick the larger realms because the population made them more appealing than the low pop counterparts. Who wants to roll a new character on what appears to be an empty server when they can roll on a busy server that looks to be more fun? Not all transfers were off of low pop realms. Some people transferred to smaller servers to play with friends or because they grew tired of life on a larger server.The transfers in weren’t numerous enough to slow the tide of people leaving.

There are a few things that affect low pop realms that you might not think about on larger population servers:

· lack of materials on the auction house prohibiting you from leveling professions without farming materials

· difficulty finding people to quest/instance/raid with from the server

· difficulty starting a new guild or joining a new guild

· recruitment can feel like the most difficult thing ever

· frustration trying to meet new people.

The last two are the hardest to deal with as a guild leader. I often have to PuG people into raids when we don’t have enough guildees to fill a raid. I ask those in the raid if they have any people on their friend’s lists that would be interested in raiding. And when that doesn’t work I’ve been forced to go to trade chat. On my server, trade chat is usually a barren wasteland.

I don’t mean that the server is a post-apocalyptic land, filled with horrible things, but rather in that it feels like everyone is gone except for me. When I say something in trade, it stays in the chat window until it eventually disappears. People rarely talk in trade and sadly when they do it’s usually a few trolls who want to spam anal jokes or other equally dumb memes. If you are trying to sell anything in trade, you might be waiting for a long while before anyone responds. Like I said, this is just for my server but I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if other low pop servers experienced the same thing.

The auction house can often be hit or miss for items that are usually listed in large quantities on other servers. The number of people who are out in the world farming for mats is smaller so the items go quickly. Prices are, of course, skewed because people don’t want to pay outrageous amounts for items like can be expected on larger servers where there are more people with money to spend. Trying to sell anything through trade chat is difficult, if not impossible, so the AH is often the only place to sell stuff. As with most markets, there are items that consistently sell, but even high demand items can take a relisting or two before they sell because people aren’t online looking to buy all the time.

And recruitment?? Don’t even get me started on how hard it is to recruit competent people! We have an age and personality requirement for our guild. In order to join you have to be over 18 and be a decent person. We don’t force people to raid if they don’t want to, but if they want to raid, we help them get gear so that they can meet our raiding minimums. When we recruit we will advertise (not spam) in trade chat in a major city, use the in-game guild finder, advertise on twitter, and post on various forums. The people on our server (the few left) tend to already be guilded, not interested in our guild, or don’t meet our two requirements.

Trying to get people to transfer to the server to join our guild doesn’t happen because the server is low pop and people don’t want to spend the money to transfer. If people decide to roll a new character on the server, the server inevitably disappoints them and they leave. We have had a small number of people join the guild but obviously it was more luck that they found us than anything else.

By this point in the post you are probably wondering what the hell all this information about low pop servers has to do with anything. Well first off I’m on a low pop and this is what I have to do deal with every day I decide to play. Second, I am writing because Blizzard has yet to do anything about this situation and it has caused a lot of frustration. In order to get rid of some of this frustration, I am writing about it. So I’m bitching about the situation but do I have any real suggestions? As a matter of fact I have a few! While they may not be the best solutions, they are at least something positive that can be tried out:

· Merge the servers

· Open current tier for cross-realm raiding

· Enable free transfers for guilds TO low pop servers from more than just 2-3 high pop servers

Merge the servers

This is often the first thing most people demand of Blizzard when it comes to low pop servers. So I’ll talk about it first. Currently Blizzard has about 256 US/South American/Oceanic realms. Of those servers, 54 are marked as low pop. That means that just over 20% of servers are low pop. Blizzard doesn’t release exact population numbers for servers, so we don’t have an exact population numbers for what makes up a low, medium, or high population. We do have nifty websites like realmpop.com that gives an approximation based on armory trawling. Because this uses data from the armory, it includes alts and the unplayed characters that still show up on the armory. Obviously inflates the numbers that realmpop displays, but since that’s all we have it’s what I’ll use.

According to realmpop, the lowest population on a low pop server (Chromaggus-PVP-US) is about 18,600 and the highest (Destromath-PVP-US) is 58,000. Compare this to the lowest population on a high pop server (Dath’Remar-PVE-US) at 80,000 and the highest population (Tichondrius-PVP-US) at 205,500. The gap between the smallest and largest high pop servers is larger than the highest population on a low pop server.

So now that my math has made my head hurt, let’s talk about merging them servers! So if you have so many servers with such a low population, why not merge them into one medium or high population server? The Blizzard developers are constantly asked about this and questioned about why it hasn’t been done to correct the problem. Their responses are usually “we’re looking into it but it isn’t something we’re going to do right now.” The reasons they give are related to problems with character/guild names across the merged servers as well as the problem of forcing people to leave their server.

I get their concerns, I really do. I’d be more than a bit upset if my mage and guild of 8 years suddenly had to have its name changed. Is this an insurmountable obstacle for realm merging? No. Through cross-realm grouping we’ve already experienced running a group with people who have the same name but are on different servers. How does the game handle that? It added their realm name to their character name. So what you’ll see is Arthasdklol – Ursin and Arthasdklol – Illidan in the same raid without the game breaking. Why not merge the servers into a new server and add the previous server name to the characters with name clashes? If you have a character with a unique name then you don’t have to add the previous server but if you have a commonly used name, you add the – previous server name to the name. It allows people who’ve had their names to keep them.

This also works for guild names. There could be an Avengers of Azeroth – Ursin and an Avengers of Azeroth – Dalaran, for example. I think if they did this it would allow guilds to still keep their names as well as allowing each guild to represent where they came from. I’m sure that this would take some work to get sorted out but honestly a little hard work now means later on a lot more people are happy in game. Sure it might look a little weird at first but if it’ll give me a server with real people to play on, I’ll get used to it!

Open the current tier for cross realm raiding

Why are raiding guilds transferring off low pop servers and taking a large amount of people with them? Because they can’t recruit people for their raid teams and so they must look to greener pastures to maintain their way of life. In the last three weeks my server has lost about 5 raiding guilds because they couldn’t find new recruits. Two of those guilds were in the top four guilds on the server for progression and the other three were not far behind.

Each guild has given the same reason for leaving the server: finding new recruits that can raid at the level/time that the guild requires was next to impossible for them. So they all went to larger realms where they could recruit the people that they needed. I know that as a raid leader of a casual guild, I HATE having to cancel our raid because we don't have enough people to fill the raid. It’s super frustrating to spend an hour in trade trying to find one or two people, but have no luck. If I were in a progression raiding guild, and was the raid leader of a team that often cancelled raids because people weren’t available, I'd be looking to move somewhere I could find people who could raid.

Blizzard has given us the ability to run dungeons, heroics, scenarios. and raids together through the wonders of cross-realm grouping, but we can only raid the previous tier of content. This means that while the Throne of Thunder raid is the current raid tier, we can only raid MSV, HoF, and ToES since those are considered the previous tier. I've been in several successful cross realm raids with people from twitter. If I am running MSV or HoF with my guild and I find myself short a dps or two, I can hit up my friends list, openraid, the TLR forums, and even twitter to find someone to fill the raid. Cross-realm raiding has made it possible for people to be on different realms and still get a chance to raid. Your server can be a low pop pvp server and it won't matter because you can invite friends to fill your raid.

My suggestion is to allow us to cross realm the current tier of raids. If I don't have enough people to raid new raid instance, I can find people who want to run it. My guilds biggest draw is that we have a great time when we raid. It's a low stress raid and we often have moments when we can't stop laughing at something that happened in raid chat or vent. When we pug people into our raids, they tend to enjoy themselves and eventually we either get a new guildee or a person that we know is really good and is willing to pug for us when we need someone.

This raid culture has gotten more than a few people to either transfer to Ursin or to start a brand new alt on the server to play with us. If I could raid current content with cross realm people, it would

(1) allow us to actually raid when we are short people

(2) possibly get us a few new members, and

(3) let people who wouldn't other wise raid the current content, raid said content.

Blizzard says they don't know if they will allow this because they’re unsure what affect it'll have on guilds. I guess Blizz seems to think that guilds are only created to bring people together to raid. Maybe they've never heard of several small guilds coming together to raid together without merging. Or possibly they've never had alts that have raided with other guilds.

Whenever opening current content to cross realm raiding gets mentioned, there are a few vocal people who claim that it will ruin progression tracking. I guess they seem to think that if you can suddenly raid current content, a pug of cross realm raiders will manage to magically down everything and lay claim to all server firsts for each person. The chances of that happening are slim to none. Even fi it were a potential issue, Blizzard could make it so that realm first kills are like guild raid achievements; You need 80% of people from a realm for it to count as a realm first for that realm. For example, I am raiding Heroic Terrace of Endless Spring in 10 man mode and have eight guildees in the raid, I pug in two people from twitter and we manage to not only clear the raid but we also get a realm first for downing the Sha of Fear. The 80% of people on my server (my guildees) will get a realm first achievement while the two pugged people will not.

It’s a simple solution to a potential complaint. It wouldn't mess with progression tracking because it’s almost all members of my guild and the probability that we would have gotten that kill if we had two more guildees is pretty high. No one is going to magically jump up in the progression charts quicker than they would have moved by being able to pug in cross realm people. BUT people will be able to raid with their friends and progress and see the raid tiers before they are old content.

I would even go as far as to say that by allowing this, progression guilds could see a high influx of new members because they could run the current tier of raids with applicants and this would allow the guilds to know whether the applicant would be able to pull their weight in a progression raid without having to pay money to server or faction change. If someone wants to join a raiding guild, they have to apply to the guild, pay to transfer a character to the new realm, run a few trial raids with the guild, and find out if they’re a good fit. If they pass they get in and the money was well spent but if they don't get in, the applicant just wasted money and they are now stuck on that server until they find another guild elsewhere. If I was in the situation where I was looking for a raiding guild, I'd love the option of NOT having to shell out money to find a guild that works for me.

Enable free transfers for guilds TO low pop servers from more than just 2-3 high pop servers

When Blizzard does allow transfers from high pop to a low pop server it’s usually from one or two high pop servers to several low pop servers. This usually means that the high pop server will see a small handful of people actually leave it to go to the low pop servers. The high pop server doesn't see a decrease in population and the low pop populations continues to decline.

My suggestion is that they open realm transfers from the top 10 high pop servers to 3-4 low pop servers. Now this won't make more people leave each server than normal BUT with enough servers having the option to transfer off, the usual tiny trickle of people could turn into a slight stream of people heading to low pop servers. There are enough high pop servers that Blizz could easily do this enough times to get at least a few new people on most of the low pop servers. It's a stretch, but at this point anything is better than nothing.

So that's at least three things that Blizzard can do to help the low population situation. Will they do any of these things? No clue. Would I LOVE it if they did? Hell yes I would! Until then, I'll be on my server, doing my thing with my guild, and hoping that we can get a few more people to join our guild and/or server.

Come on Blizzard, don't make me cancel any more of my raids due to not having enough people!

Blizzcon Feels

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 18:24:00 +0000

Blizzard has announced the dates for this year’s Blizzcon: November 8-9. What does this mean? It means that this year there will be a Blizzcon in Anaheim where hopefully we will get all sorts of new info about the next expansion for WoW/Starcraft/Diablo/Lost Vikings. I have always wanted to go to Blizzcon and see all the cool stuff in person but logistics have made it extremely difficult. However this year is different. I turn 30 this year(I know I’m a baby to some and old to others) and my lady love asked me what I wanted to do to celebrate and I told her I wanted to go to Blizzcon. She has agreed to make it happen for us so if we can get tickets we will be at Blizzcon in November!! We booked a room and once the tickets go on sale we will be camping out in the online queue to get tickets.

Of course immediately after reserving the hotel room I looked at twitter to see who was planning on going to Blizzcon. There were several people made the decision to go and there were some on the fence about whether they could go or not. Sadly there were a few people who either couldn’t make it or were choosing to not attempt to go. I was excited about the prospect of meeting some of the people who were going to try and go to Blizzcon when suddenly my brain decided to be a scumbag.

For those of you who are new around these parts, I have made mention before that I am an introvert (shocking I know) and while I tend to have a few extrovert tendencies I tend to have social anxiety hit me often. It’s why I have been on twitter for 2 years now and I barely have 5000 tweets compared to people who have been on for a quarter of that time and have triple the amount of tweets. I tend to spend most of my time watching the conversations going on between people and often I don’t see any place where I can join the conversation. Most times I see an opening I the conversation where I can join in, I stop and think about what I’m about to say and over think it. What if what I say isn’t relevant? What if they hate what I said? What if they just keep on talking and ignore what I said?

Well I started thinking about Blizzcon and possibly meeting some of the people I interact with on twitter and the social anxiety started kicking in.

It honestly reminded me of a scene from the movie “How the Grinch stole Christmas” when the Grinch is debating showing up to the Whoville Whobilation:

Grinch: (after standing grumpily with his arms crossed) All right. I'll swing by for a minute, allow them to envy me, grab a handful of popcorn shrimp and blow outta there. (heads for the door, then stops abruptly and returns nervously) But what if it's a cruel prank? What if it's a cash bar?! How dare they! (scowls, then calms down) All right, I'll go. But I shall be fashionably late. No. Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes! (groans in frustration) Definitely not. (firmly, heading for the door with his hand behind his back) All right! I've made my decision. I'm going, And that's that! (shows his hand) Ah! Had my fingers crossed.

My brain started asking me similar questions. What if people don’t want to meet up? What if I meet them and they hate me? What if I make an ass of myself? What if I do or say something that causes a large number of people to unfollow me on twitter or stop reading my blog or listening to my podcast? Damn it brain why can’t you just let me be happy????? My brain had me thinking that maybe I might have made a huge mistake in wanting to go to Blizzcon.

Thankfully the awesomeness of actually being at Blizzcon outweighed all the things my brain thought up. I will be at Blizzcon and I will see all the cool panels in person and just maybe I might even participate in a lore question thing or a contest or something. I will be at Blizzcon! If any of my readers are going to be going as well and want to meet up and hang out at the bar, let me know! I plan on having a great time and if I can meet people that’ll be awesome but if I don’t, I’ll still have a great time.

Third times a charm

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 22:44:00 +0000

Apparently I am rather bad at remembering to check my calendar because my third blogaversary was on January 25^th and here I am almost a week later and just now getting around to writing a post for it. What can I say, I’m a horrible slacker and you should all stop reading whatever inane crap I write. Now for some reason, some of you are still reading this so I suppose I should continue this post. I have repeatedly mentioned that I started this blog because I had a lot of time in between courses so I decided to start blogging to keep me from being bored to tears. I have somehow managed to keep writing because it’s an outlet for my thoughts on WoW/leadership/finance/robots. I know my wife is happy that I write this blog because that way I don’t drive her crazy with all the stuff running through my head.

Well anyway, it’s been 3 years. I’ve had a lot of visitors come to my blog and some have even been nice enough to leave me comments. The past year has definitely been a busy one for me; I started a podcast, designedsome cool shirts, wrote a short story involving my mage, wrote a class guidefor the best mage spec, and of course wrote blog posts that some of you read.

In game I’ve been working on gearing for raiding and leveling alts that also need gearing for raiding. Stupid vicious cycle of needing to do stuff to get gear so you can raid and get gear. I’ve been slacking and only have 6 level 90 characters. I know, I know, it’s shameful and I feel all of the shame. I’ve got a mage, pally, monk, rogue, death knight, and another mage. I’m currently working on leveling my gnome priest and horde dk so those two will be my next level capped characters. I am not going to lie, I think I might have a problem.

So the question ahead of me other than what alt I will level after the priest/dk is: what do I do to celebrate 3 years of blogging? I thought about my usual celebration event the gnomish death race but while we had a good turn out last time, I think I need something new and different. So I thought to myself, why not do something pet battle related? I know I have been spending a lot of time leveling pets to 25 and battling pet tamers across the zones. Maybe some other people have also done the same and would like to do a tournament. So maybe in February I’ll post details about when/where the tournament will be held. The beauty of pet battles is that they are shared across all your characters so you can roll a level one on my server and participate or if you are alliance you can be battle tag friended/invited to my server for some battling! If anyone reading this is interested please let me know, I think if we can get a decent amount of people we can have a great time.

In parting, I leave you with a funny story that happened to me in the olden days of the Burning Crusade expansion. At the time if you were a tank you had to grind rep with the Keepers of Time for their helm enchant. This was a very annoying rep grind because there were only 2 instances that gave KoT rep: Old Hillsbrad and the Black Morass. Sadly each gave crap for rep and took forever to find a group for/do because you had to do a super annoying quest that involved walking around the caverns of time listening to some npc yammer on about the timeways and such. If you’ve ever done the Aldor/Scryer quest when you first enter Shattrath, it’s like that but worse because you are walking in such a large circle and you had no choice but to do it if you wanted to do Old Hillsbrad. More often than not you would get a group, everyone would make their way to the instance and someone would NOT be able to zone in because they had never done the stupid quest and couldn’t be bothered to do it then.

Anyway back to the story, a guildee was leveling his paladin and needed to grind rep with the KoT. He asked me if I had any alts around the level 66 range that I could take to the instance with him. Luckily for him I had a spriest that I was working on and had done the walk around attunement on. The two of us get in vent and we get a healer and dps who were also attuned and head to the instance. My guildee and I were the only ones who had done the instance before so we had to explain what to expect to the dps/healer. My guildee decided that since he needed rep he was going to find every single mob in the instance that gave rep and pull it. We cleared all the mobs in the first area including the mobs in the tower to the left of the main building where Thrall was. The poor pugged people must have been wondering why the instance had so much trash that needed to be cleared. We finish the instance and the dps/healer leave so my guildee pulls in another guildee who had a resto shaman and we clear it again with just the three of us. Since I was the only dps this took longer than a normal run and when we finished we reset the instance and went back in.

The three of us start clearing trash and mount up to run to the next part when suddenly the healer got a bad lag spike that caused him to run forward into several mobs and dc’d him. Of course all the mobs kill him and turn to us. Thankfully the two of us were still mounted and I’m not ashamed to say that we turned around and ran for the entrance. As we were running my guildee tells me in vent “Why are we running? We should just kill them!” I hesitate but he tells me that we can do it so I agree to give it a chance. He tells me “Heal me! We can take them!” as he dismounts and runs into the chasing mobs. I pop out of shadow and toss him a shield and a renew when suddenly he gets blinded and they all turn to me and do unspeakable things to me. As soon as I'm dead they proceed to kill my guildee. At this point I’m yelling at him in vent for getting us killed and all he can say is “I didn’t know they cc’ed! I didn't know they cc'ed!!!” I was laughing so hard at this point that I couldn’t seriously be mad at him but I have yet to let him live it down and this happened 5-6 years ago.

It’s become a running joke in my guild between the two of us to yell out “Heal me! We can take them!” whenever we’re in an instance or questing. So yeah, there’s a story about Jed that hopefully made you laugh a little at my death.

Thank you everyone who reads my blog, retweets my blog post tweets, leaves comments on my blog, and subscribes to my post feed. You are all awesome and I am thankful that you are all reading my blog, even if it is just to laugh at me. Here’s to another year of crazy blogging fun!

Have Jed, will travel

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 02:44:00 +0000

Well the last post I had written decided that when I sent it to myself it was NOT going to send and so I lost what I had written so far for this post. I think it is a sign that what I had written was crap and that I shouldn’t force anyone to read what I had written. Point made universe, point made.

Here is the basics of today’s post:

Who: Me, possibly you, maybe you, definitely you, oh and you.

What: I’m a bored 90. I like helping people. I’ve decided to offer my services to the WoW public! This means that if you are a lowbie trying to run instances, I can help you out. If you’re coming back to the game and want to know whats changed, I can help you. If you are a healer and want to run old raids but can’t solo them, I can help you. If you don’t know what to do at level cap, I can help you. In a group with friends and need a tank for something, I can help you. Can’t quite solo a difficult quest mob/rare, I can help you.

Where: Thanks to cross realm zones, it can be on my server or your server or that other server over there.

Why: I like helping people and along the way people have helped me with things so I have decided to pay it forward and help others. I get nothing out of doing this other than the satisfaction of knowing that I have helped someone. You aren’t obligated to help anyone else out along the way but if you did it’d be neat.

The details:

I decided to do this one day after spending a few fun hours in Ulduar with a cool Disco Priest and her husband. They had been trying to solo Ulduar for achievements and the mount but they needed a little boost. Having both the 10 and 25 man achievement mounts from Ulduar, I can say that I know my way around that place so I offered up my dk to help out and we managed to get many of the achievements that they needed. This got me thinking about how many people in game have the desire and drive to do things like old raids or rep grinds but have no knowledge about how to go about them.

My guild raids one night a week and the rest of the week I am usually putzing around on alts either leveling them or working on their professions. This causes me to have a lot of time in game where I am bored and looking for something fun to do. Most things are more fun with friends after all. I tend to run parts of the LFR on 3 different characters and always love having someone I know along with me to make it more interesting.

I have a few alts still at 85 that I wouldn't mind leveling through instances/questing with friends. Currently sitting at 85 I have an enh shaman, resto druid, ele/resto shaman, warlock, warrior, spriest, guardian druid, and windwalker monk. At 90 and looking for gear I have a frost mage, frost dk, brewmaster monk, combat rogue, and fire mage. These are all alliance BUT for my horde readers, I have an 86 frost dk that I'd be up for questing/instancing with along with several lowbies from level 20 to 70.

I know to some of my readers this may seem like an elaborate scheme to do something nefarious...but it isn't. I have amazing people in my guild who will gladly help me with stuff when I ask and I know some people out there don't have access to this level of support. I want to help people in the hopes of bringing balance to the force only without the dismemberment and large scale genocide.

In conclusion if you want some help with stuff in game, add me to your friends list: Jedem#1828 and let me know who you are so I can make a note next to your name. Then as long as I'm not in the middle of an instance or on limited time, I will be more than happy to help out. If you want to just chat about stuff in game, I am also down with that. If this is all for naught and no one friends me, well at least I will know that I have tried to do something good for the community and I guess that'll have to be enough for me.

Thunderous Fury

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 17:22:00 +0000

This is a post that I have wanted to write for two years; in fact it’s something that I’ve been working on for over 5 years. What the hell am I rambling about you may be asking yourselves. Well I’m talking about [Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker]. The very same item that is often linked by trade chat trolls. Now I am not just linking it because I want to troll you all. I am talking about it because a week and a half ago this happened:

That’s right my DK got the second binding that he needed to complete the legendary and I finally got my very own Thunderfury. Big whoop, you might be saying to yourselves, it’s a useless item that you can’t even use nowadays. Well to those people I say…SHUT UP! I have wanted my own Thunderfury since I was raiding MC on my mage in vanilla. I decided to start farming for it in BC on my protadin because I wanted him to have it. I would go into MC and solo Garr and Baron Geddon which at the time was difficult to do unless you were block capped and sometimes it would take forever to kill the bosses. You can youtube videos of paladins prot solo’ing the two of them and trust me when I tell you that it is boring as hell. It was pretty much a lot of block damage from Blessing of Sanctuary/Retribution Aura as the boss would beat on you and you’d judge light to heal yourself some. Super boring and you had to bring an extra shield with you because the shield you had equipped had a tendency to break from all the damage being done to it.

In Wrath it got a little easier to solo since you were 80 and had higher stats than you did in BC. It still took a while but at least you could avoid some of the trash mobs. I sadly did not get a binding off either boss in Wrath on my paladin. =( When Cata came around it was even easier to farm the two bosses that drop the bindings and I was regularly farming MC on my pally, warrior, rogue, and dk. I finally experienced some success and got the first binding off Garr on my pally, rogue, and dk! Of course Geddon refused to drop his binding so I was only half way to a Thunderfury. I suppose something is better than nothing. To give you readers an idea of how long I’ve been farming for the bindings on my pally, every single mob in MC will give you rep with the Hydraxian Waterlords until Revered, at which point only bosses give rep and that’s only about 250 rep. I am 7.9k/21k revered with them on my pally. I mainly avoided trash and only focused on killed the two bosses I needed for the bindings. Most of the rep I’ve gotten is from killing the two bosses.

When MoP came around, I continued farming for the bindings and finally after years and years of farming, Geddon dropped the second binding…for my dk. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu! But at least one of my characters got the damn binding!

I had most of the quest stuff ready but I had to farm for a few things to transmute into things I needed for the quest.

Once I got that done I headed to Silithus, home of sand, sand bugs, and one very special NPC.

I gave him his items and he gave me an item to summon Prince Thunderaan.

Being 85 it was relatively easy to kill him but I can imagine how much fun that fight must have been at 60. You needed a raid to kill him and it really must have felt like an accomplishment to down him then.

I proceeded to own the Prince and I looted the item I needed off of him and gave it to the NPC.

He was nice enough to give me my legendary weapon.

It was finally mine after years and years of farming and hoping!

Now that I have one Thunderfury, I will still continue to farm for it on my pally because damn it I want one on my pally! I’ve spent this long farming for it, whats a few more years?

Days of Future Past

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 18:49:00 +0000

Today I am going to talk about several different things and hopefully it’ll seem like I have coherent thoughts when I write (I don’t) and it will all blend together to make a good post. (it won’t) So buckle your seat belts boys and girls and prepare for the trip of your life!*

*Trip of your life may not actually be the trip of your life. Mileage may vary. If this is the trip of your life…you may need to have more fun in your life!*

To celebrate WoW’s 8^th anniversary Blizzard released this video that mashed up a lot of the previous game cinematics and to me it is awesome! If you haven’t seen it yet you should open up another tab/window and watch it right now. Go ahead I’ll wait.

If you’ve been playing for several years I am sure that you are probably reminiscing about those times. Such good times were had. Not that I’m not having good times now mind you, it was just a different time and nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Anyway, that video is awesome and I can’t believe that WoW is 8 years old now. Kind of crazy but I still remember when they released this video showing how they made the original trailer. I was in a friends dorm room and he showed me the video and I was just stunned that something could look so amazing! Ahhh good times.

Honestly if 8 years ago you had told me that in a year I would start up a guild that would last 7+ years, I’d have told you that you were crazy! When WoW came out I believe I was playing Final Fantasy 11 and I had no interest in leaving it since so many of my friends at college were playing it. 7 years is a long time to be playing anything and I am glad that I still have reasons every day to log in and play the game. Not just the game itself but the friends that I've made in game. Those friendships in game have led to me getting married, have a best man that I met in game, and having a great time online with people I've never met face to fact but can make even something as tedious as rep grinding feel like a great time.

Well enough looking back! It’s time to move forward and look to the future! I have a lot of projects that I’m working on at the moment which have kept me busy and unable to really blog much. (likely story I know) I’m working on getting a second raid night OR a second raid group going on in guild and that of course requires people level alts/gear alts so that’s always a big time sink. Why can’t people be like me and level multiple alts to level cap quickly! Slackers, I tell ya.

I’m still podcasting the Follow the Leader Podcast with Orvillius, Nymphy, and Aero but it seems that getting a set time to record with those three is always a difficult assignment. If you haven’t had a chance to listen to the podcast, you totally should. It’s a podcast focused on guild leading, raid leading, and general leadership stuff. I’ve shared plenty of personal stories there about my leadership history so you should all tune in just for that alone! My stories are comedy plutonium!* But we do have good advice for people who are in the leadership role in game.

*Not really comedy plutonium. In fact it’s more like weapons grade balonium.*

Out of game, I have a few things that are keeping me busy. I am working on a few short stories that I plan on self-publishing online through Amazon once they are ready to go. I am afraid of mentioning what they are about in case anyone tries to steal my ideas or in reality if someone thinks the premise is dumb. Either way once I get ready to list them I’ll be sure to make a post about it or tweet it out in case anyone would like to read something I’ve written. Never done any serious writing like this other than the choose my adventure series of posts and I can say for sure that writing is not easy. Nothing like sitting down to write something and just staring at the computer trying to continue where I left off on the story. Damn you writers block for not kicking in until I actually have time to write!!!

Along with writing stuff, I just came into possession of a working arcade cabinet and it is pretty damn sweet. Right now it’s in working condition and everything but it is powered by a really old (Pentium 2) computer so I’m working on upgrading it piece by piece so that it can load up the arcade games faster than it does now. I may make a separate page with pictures of the current progress I’m making on the cabinet if anyone is interested. It should be for fun times. I will say this for the cabinet, playing Captain America and the Avengers AND Captain Commando at an arcade are among some of my precious memories of childhood and the fact that I can play them at home now on a cabinet I own is a dream come true! =D

So that’s the blog post, I hope whoever read it enjoyed it. Lot going on at the moment that I can’t write about yet but maybe someday soon I can. Until that day, I’ll just have to continue writing my horrible blog posts that really only three people will read.

Pandarian Things

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Fri, 09 Nov 2012 18:18:00 +0000

It’s been a month and a half since the Mists of Pandaria launched and things have been a bit busy in my little corner of the internets. I’ve leveled 2 characters to 90, gotten another to 89, gotten a monk to 86, farmed a lot, and gotten my pally ready for raiding with the guild. Very busy 6 weeks. So what do I think about this expansion now that I’ve had time to spend a good amount of time playing it? I think that Blizzard has done a good job so far with most of the new stuff in Pandaria. I am having a good time playing and as usual I don’t see myself quitting any time soon. Lot of real life stuff going on so I haven’t been able to blog about what I’ve been up to in WoW.

The Good

I LOVE ~~lamp~~ pandas. They are seriously fun to play and just watching them run around is hilarious. Pandaria is a very beautiful place and flying around it and just watching the scenery is a fun time. The storylines in each zone are also pretty awesome and at times you can easily find yourself pulled into the storyline, cheering on the NPC’s or feeling sad when someone dies/succumbs to emotions.

I can’t forget to mention pet battles. Oh man pet battles are so much fun. Stupid awesome pets requiring you to battle to make them even more awesome. DAMN YOU PET BATTLES! DAMN YOU AND YOUR FUN! Must battle one more pet, just one more pet. One more…just one…must be the best, like no one ever was…

The Bad

SO MANY DAILIES! Once you hit 90 there are so many things that you can do that it can be slightly overwhelming. There are Tiller dailies, Anglers dailies, Golden Lotus dailies, Klaxxi dailies, cooking dailies, archeology dailies, Cloud Serpent dailies, AND you have dailies to get rep with individual people like Nat Pagle and the Black Prince. If you want to get VP you do dailies. If you want to get gear because the LFR/raid won’t drop pieces for you, you do dailies because you need to get revered with factions to buy VP gear. It’s a little weak but honestly you don’t NEED to be fully geared out in VP gear to do well in raids.

Pandas are awesome BUT since both factions can have them, you are technically neutral until you pick a faction around level 12 or so. This means that you have to go through the Panda starter zone with no guild chat, no direct whispers, and no mailbox. Kind of a pain but thankfully once you pick a faction and get out into the world you realize that you are a Panda and that you rock. Until that point though, you are isolated and worst of all…you have no bags except for the ones that you can get to drop! The horror of running around with 6 slot bags!!!

The Guild

My guild was able to work hard and pull together and snag the Realm First Working as a Better Team achievement which was really cool. I know that several of my guildees got a few realm first profession achievements which is great for them. We also started raiding and downed the first boss in the Mogushan Vaults, the Stone Guard, and we are making good progress with the second boss, Feng the something or other. Seriously that guy made me want to punch the computer when we wiped at 8%! So close!!!! But I know that we are awesome and we’ll down it the next time we raid.

Speaking of which, we are looking for more people to start a second raid group on Sundays! Tanks, heals, and dps are needed! It’d be Sundays 5-8 PST on Ursin-US-PVP. Oh and it’s for alliance only in case anyone was wondering. We’re a casual group that happens to raid and our raids are usually full of fun times so if you’re looking for a home check us out! Also if you're just looking for a guild where you can be social and not raid, we would totes love to have ya! =D

Overall I am having a good time. I love my little farm where I can grow veggies or motes of harmony and since I hit exalted with the tillers I finally got the 60 exalted factions achievement. I’ll probably slowly work on getting my mage exalted with the remaining factions that I need and see how far I am from 70 exalted factions and the Beloved title. I might have issues.

To all the lowbie groups

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 21:44:00 +0000

I am going to start this post by announcing that this is a rant. If you have no desire to read my angry rant, please feel free to browse through my other posts until you find something more to your liking. If you’re still with me, hold on to something because this is going to get angry and possibly violent. I’ve been leveling my panda and I LOVE it! They are a fun class to play regardless of spec and I highly recommend leveling one. Now because I am one of those weird people who like to play a class to level cap as the same spec that they are going to be at said level cap, I tend to level some characters as healers or tanks. For my panda I decided to level as a Brewmaster, which is the tank spec.

This means that I’ve run a lot of dungeons so far. I usually quest for a bit and then queue for a bit so that I don’t end up running the same dungeon a million times in a row. Nothing like running RFD 5 times in a row to make you want to stop playing for the night. Anyway, since I’ve been leveling I end up in a lot of groups with everyone but me wearing all heirlooms. Why don’t I have heirlooms you ask? Well because until this expansion each account could only have 10 character slots per server. I had one of each class at level cap. I had no need to buy heirlooms because I didn’t have a character that could benefit from them and I would rather spend the JP on other stuff like mounts or crafting mats or gnomish hookers. Had I been smart, I would have bought them with the extra JP I had before it got turned into gold in 5.0.4 or whatever patch it was. But since I’m dumb and didn’t remember to do that, I have no heirlooms.

Does this make leveling harder, having no heirlooms? No. Does it make leveling slower? No because I level pretty fast since I know where to go for each quest and I supplement my questing with herbing/mining for more free xp. Anyway, back to my rant. Whenever I zone into an instance the first thing I do is greet the group. Some groups respond and some are dead silent the entire time, it varies. After I greet everyone, I type the following message “Please don’t pull for me or ahead of me and we’ll have a great time.” Why do I do this? Well I do it because as a tank there is nothing more frustrating than tanking a group of mobs and seeing one of the dps go and grab more mobs that they then expect you to pick up. If you don’t and they die, you better be ready for them to accuse you of being a bad tank, the healer of being super bad, and the dps for not helping them out.

It is super frustrating because it happens so often in groups now that so many people have access to heirlooms. I often have to tell people that they aren’t the tank and that if they wanted to tank they should queue as a tank. As a tank I know what I can pull and survive, I know when my cooldowns are available, and I know when mob groups should be pulled back to not grab pats. When a DPS decides to grab more mobs I warn them once or twice to NOT do that. If they persist on pulling more mobs, I don’t taunt off them. I let them die. I got into a fight with a DPS who kept trying to defend a dumb DK that not only pulled for me, he death gripped mobs off me. The Dumb DPS argued that as long as stuff was dying and no one was in any real danger, what did it matter if people pulled for me?

At first I was shocked that someone would argue with me when I told the dk that if he pulled again, that he could tank whatever he pulled. I was nice and warned the dk several times before letting him deal with the mob packs that he pulled. The Dumb DPS thought I was in the wrong because I, the tank, wanted to be the only person TANKING! Honestly I don’t care if you have a million heirlooms and feel that you can solo things, if you queue as a dps, you are dps and NOT a tank. It’d be like me queuing as a healer and just deciding to dps or tank. You select what role you want to be in the instance. I choose to tank because I like tanking and I want to make sure that when I get to level cap I will know all there is to know about tanking. If you are a dps and feel that the tank could move faster, drop queue and requeue as a tank and see how you feel when people pull stuff for you, pull off of you, and blame you when they die to agro. Don’t pull if you’re not a tank.

Tanking in instances at times can be a thankless job and it gets worse when I run into dps who want to tank/pull for me. It can get seriously frustrating. I haven’t had any issues when I’m tanking on my pally in MoP regs/heroics so maybe it has to do with people not taking lowbie instances seriously. I know some people go “lawls lowbie instances who cares steamroll it all” but that can piss off your group mates and I KNOW it pisses off your tank. I’ve leveled through running lowbie instances on several healers and when I see it happening, I just don’t bother to heal the overeager dps. When they ask why they didn’t get heals, I explain that they are not the tank and should not pretend to be. Usually the tank will whisper me thanking me for either sticking up for them or to laugh at the dumb dps.

People wonder why there are so few tanks leveling, this is why. If you’re new to the game and want to try your hand at tanking and run into this kind of behavior, you are going to get discouraged really quickly. If you’re with a group of guildees and they don’t mind you pulling stuff for them, good for you, have at it! When you queue with a random group as a dps, remember that you are a dps. Now I am not saying that if a group of mobs gets pulled accidently to not grab one or two of them and hold them until the tank can grab them. If you want to speed the group along, do everyone a favor and don’t.

Well that’s my rant. Angry tank is angry! But Pandas are cool, Pandaria is cool, Battle pets are AWESOME, and my guild starts raiding next week hopefully. I would write about dailies and how raiders are forced to do them…except I haven’t really been doing dailies. I do some of my farming dailies on my mage and then switch over to either my pally for heroics or I switch to my monk for lowbie leveling action. I don’t let things like dailies stress me out, I play the game to enjoy myself and honestly I don’t even have enough points to buy anything worthwhile on my Pally even if I had the required rep. If we have a night of 1-2% wipes next week well I’ll be all over them dailies to get a little bit more edge so we can down stuff. Until then I’ll be here flying around on my He-man the Movie flying Disc. =D

Bad World PVP

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 15:42:00 +0000

Let me start this story by stating that the server that I play on is a pvp server. I’ve played on this server since it opened up in 2005 and as a result I’ve seen my fair share of world pvp. When I was a young mage questing in Redridge, it was a common occurrence to have high level horde raid the town and gank every poor lowbie alliance person they saw. On a pvp server you often get used to such douche baggery happening and when you are higher level and able to do something about it, most people often do. I can remember several pvp battles in Lakeshire, Menethil Harbor, and the ever famous Southshore. Sometimes the pvp fights were a nice distraction and sometimes they were a rather large annoyance but being on a pvp server, you knew what you could expect at any time. To me this made the game a little more deadly and exciting. Not everyone’s cup of tea I suppose.

Sadly as the years have gone by, my server population went from medium in vanilla to low in BC and has stayed there since. Every now and then it’ll pop up briefly to medium before sinking back into its usual low pop status. What does this mean? Well it means that while leveling a lowbie alt you’re more likely to see a group of mobs having a naked dance party than seeing a horde. In fact that’s one of the biggest selling points I tell people on twitter when I tell them to roll on my server to play with me! This is mostly true except for poor Megs who kept running into horde who managed to kill her often. Anyway, because our population is so low, world pvp doesn’t happen that often. This is great for leveling alts but bad for people who want to pvp.

Due to the low pop numbers, many people have played on the server but have no clue how to really do world pvp and when faced with it, fold like a house of cards. The other night I logged onto my mage, who was 87 at the time, in Halfhill and was mailing stuff to an alt. Suddenly, I found myself cheap shotted and unable to move. Obviously a rogue decided that he would gank a clothie and get some honor. I waited a few seconds for the guards to show up and kill him and to my surprise they didn’t. Well instead of sitting back and letting him get free honor from killing me, I decided to make him work for his honor. I tossed on ice barrier, frost nova’ed him, and proceeded to not only kill him, but to kill him so hard that he should have been seriously embarrassed. He was 87 as well and when I looked him up later on the armory, he had all MoP gear.

The guy had the advantage of surprise and gear and yet he failed. He popped all his cool downs and only managed to get me to 50% health. It was hilarious to watch. After he died I bandaged myself and went back to the mail box to continue my business. I figured that he wouldn’t try again since he never even got me close to dead. I might have underestimated him because not 30 seconds later I found myself cheap shotted again. I got him to 20% this time before a horde priest showed up and healed him to full. As I had no healer I decided to run into the guards so that they would agro onto him and kill him. Damn guards killed me BUT they also killed the rogue and chased down the priest and killed him. I figure that because of that it was worth dying to guards.

Well later when I was out questing with my guildee who was a prot warrior, the same damn rogue tries to gank me again! We both proceed to turn to him and stomp him into the ground. As I said before, I’ve done my fair share of pvp in WoW and in Vanilla I managed to get the Knight rank which required a lot of honor grinding. My guildee is all about the pvp and was a Knight-Lieutenant in vanilla. We both wear our pvp ranks as our titles. This silly rogue was so obsessed with killing me that tried to attack two seasoned pvp’ers. We killed him and in vent I tell him about my earlier adventures with the rogue. We both had a good laugh and went about our questing.

You’d think that this would be the end of the story right? Well you’d be wrong because not more than 20 minutes later the damn rogue tries to gank me again. My guildee was gathering a bunch of mobs and tanking them while I aoe’ed them down in melee range. The rogue tried to gank and before he could even do more than stun me, my guildee charged him and proceed to wail away on him. We stomp him into the ground again and loot the mobs we killed. 20 minutes later the rogue has had enough of trying to gank and has decided to just harass us by sapping one of us and distracting the other. He only did this for a few minutes and went away. We figured that he was trying to annoy us since he knew that he couldn’t take us on. We continued questing and another 20 minutes later…you guessed it, I was cheap shotted once again. At that point it was just sad that he kept trying to kill me but we still killed him.

I think that this was the final straw for him because the rogue left us alone for the rest of the night. Yesterday my guildee was running around farming up ore when he spots the rogue and decided to gank him! The rogue was so bad that he got ganked by a prot warrior who had mobs on him. He announced it in vent and we had a laugh. My wife was in vent with us and asked about it and after I told her about the bad rogue she laughed.

I think the moral of this story is: if you try and gank someone on a pvp server, don’t try and gank someone with a pvp title. If you do try and fail at ganking them, don’t keep trying to gank them repeatedly because they will keep killing you. I honestly think that this rogue figured I was an easy kill because he’s probably ganked many bad pvp’ers. You’d think he’d have learned his lesson after the second time I killed him. I still shake my head and giggle at how bad that guy was. World pvp, more like world free honor from bad rogues!

Pandarian Shenanigans

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 17:51:00 +0000

The Mists of Pandaria expansion has been out about a week now and I’ve been very busy in game seeing what it has to offer. I think that after all I’ve seen so, I am loving this expansion. The first day I might have caught a 24 hour type of bug that forced me to stay home…and play a lot of WoW. Damn those strange and random illnesses! (/shifty eyes)The first day I said forget leveling I’m battling my pets and so I ran around leveling up a battle team. I have yet to name my battle team or even the pets in said team but they are around level 10/11. I have collected a lot of new pets and currently I am under 50 pets to the 250 unique pets achievement. Woots.

After a while I decided to go quest for a bit in Pandaria and see what else the expansion included. I had quested in the Jade forest on the Beta back before they changed the whole zone. Because of this I had seen what the starter quest lines were like and I think that the new starter area is a ton better than the old area. In the old starter area you would find yourself in the Jade Forest under attack from Hozen and you would have to defend yourself. The new zone has you take the fight to the Horde and their base on the island. I much prefer the new quests as they definitely convey the “we are at war” concept that blizzard has been pushing on us for this expansion.

The quests after that are fun and while there are some kill thirty dudes for their eyelashes, there are many new ones like drinking dream booze to see my dreams, riding a mine cart and fending off attacking mobs, and taking over an NPC and shooting a bunch of mobs from a long distance so another NPC can do something. Seriously questing is a lot more fun now.

I rolled a Panda and played through the starter zone and that was a good time. It is a little annoying that you can’t be in a guild until you pick a faction but I understand why they did it. Not being able to chat in guild while leveling the Panda made the starter zone a little less fun than it could have been otherwise. I did enjoy it though and would recommend everyone make at least one Panda alt. Even if all you do is walk around the island and look at the scenery, its time well spent.

I think that sums up the graphics for this expansion: time well spent. There are so many different areas and each one has a unique feel to it. I was talking to the wife about the previous expansions and how this one was so different from each. BC was very colorful and alien, Wrath was dark and dreary, and Cataclysm felt fiery and grim. MoP so far feels light, exotic, and it to me it feels like blizzard set out to make this a more fun expansion. I suppose part of that could be because in previous expansions we were trying to save the world from demons, the scourge, and a giant dragon wearing retainer. So far I haven’t felt like my character was under all this pressure to save the world…again. I’ve felt like I’m helping the common pandas in each zone with their problems and making a difference. Sure I am sticking it to the horde along the way whenever I can but that’s also part of the expansion theme of Horde vs. Alliance.

The game has some beautiful scenery and if you zoomed by each quest hub to get to 90 as soon as possible you may have missed some nice things. I’m personally running around and having such a good time not focusing on leveling. I’m almost 87 on my mage and I’ve run around all of Pandaria grabbing archaeology things for a red cloud, so I’ve seen a lot of awesome things that I am looking forward to. Maybe in a few months once the new expansion shine wears off, I might think otherwise but for the moment I like MoP.

Guild Update:

We actually managed to snag several profession realm firsts the first night of the expansion. One of my guildees picked up four profession realm firsts alone. We also picked up the Guild Working as a Better Team realm first achievement. We’ve got several people at or close to 90 which is fun because they are running guild groups for heroics/scenarios. I can’t wait to jump into heroics with a guild group and avoid the whole pug scene.

Because my guild could always use more new and cool people, we are always recruiting! If you want to come raid with us, we’ll probably have room. If you want a social place where you can level a panda or other alts, we definitely have room. We are on Ursin-US-PVP and we raid Wednesdays from 5-8 PST for people who want to raid. In Cata we finished DS 2/8 HM. We are a casual guild that happens to raid. Our focus is on having fun and enjoying the game. If you are looking for an established guild that won’t disappear suddenly tomorrow, we turned 7 years old in July and I have no plans to disband the guild any time soon if ever. So if you are over the age of 18 and looking for a guild like us, why not check us out! Avengers of Azeroth

Guild Mentoring

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 16:45:00 +0000

It was announced recently which guilds were selected to participate in the WoW guild mentoring program. For those of you who have no clue what the guild mentoring program is, it’s a program that has guilds on select servers open their doors to whoever wants to join so that they can be shown how to play the game by people in the guilds. Each guild will welcome new and old players(under 85) alike and I assume that blizzard is hoping that by doing this the number of people who stop playing the game because they have no clue what they are doing, will decrease. When I first heard about the program I thought it was a cool idea but after some thought I had mixed feelings about it.

On one hand it can be a great experience for people who are starting the game and don’t know anyone who is playing the game that can help them. We assume that with WoW’s subscription numbers being in the millions, everyone who wants to play the game is already playing it but of the 9 million subscribers only a quarter or so of that is from North American players. That means that there are plenty of people who are not playing WoW but see the commercials/game box and decide to give it a spin. These new people start out with nothing and have no clue what they are doing. Remember back to when you first started, how many of you had no friends/family that played the game? How many of you ran around exploring the world alone? How many of you resorted to asking in trade/general chat for answers to questions you had about the game?

For new players, being alone and having to figure everything out by yourself is a tough thing to do and will cause many people to stop playing the game rather quickly. Running an instance like Deadmines or Wailing Caverns can be a daunting task for a completely new player. I remember when I first ran it with friends in college and even though I had friends around me that I could ask questions, I was still overwhelmed at times. Vanilla veterans will remember the first time they found out that you could jump on top of the boat wheel to avoid a wipe near the end. Most people in the lower dungeons are alts of people who just want to finish the dungeon as quickly as possible and have no interest in walking a player through the game. Hell, just surviving a LFD group can be tough. Between name calling, dps meter linking, and gogogogog attitudes, a new person can easily be frightened off.

Having a guild that can be patient with your questions about the game is great. Being able to get answers and explanations without being ridiculed or given wrong information is great.

At this point you may be thinking to yourselves that all that sounds like a great idea and what exactly is wrong with the guild mentoring program. Well my biggest problem with the program is that you are inundated with people who are new or coming back to the game, want to join your guild, and whose personality may clash with your guilds culture. I haven’t seen anything that says that you can turn away new people from your guild. Having one or two new people who need help learning the game isn’t that bad but when you can potentially have 20 or 30 new people all at the same time who want help, it can wear you down. You also open your guild to people who just want to troll you and cause problems for you. I have no clue why people do things like this but some people do seem to enjoy being a troll. I guess bad attention is better than no attention.

All the new people would have to be treated like regular members which can also be problematic if you use a forum because they would register and have access to private member stuff. I know on our guild forums we have a thread with myspace/facebook/twitter links for members to put their info if they’d like to be friends with other guildees. Since all new people would have to be treated like real members, they’d have access to that info and that could definitely cause problems. When people join my guild they usually go through a process before they join the guild so we can get a feel for who they are as a person. If they mesh well with us in vent/raid they will get an invite into the guild. We aren’t just throwing random people into the guild all willy-nilly.

There hasn’t been a lot of details explaining what you can or can’t do if you’re in the program and to me, that’s not cool. The FAQ for the program is very vague and doesn’t really answer a lot of the questions I have. Maybe once the program is over, we can get more info from the guilds who participated in the program about what they received from Blizzard in terms of rules. If I commit my guild to something for four months, I want to know upfront what I can or can’t do during that time frame.

I hope that the guild mentor program works out and helps a lot of new players get better at the game and causes them to stick around. I know that I won’t participate in the program but I wish the guilds that are participating in it the best of luck. To the guilds that are mentors, I say good luck. It’ll be a lot of work for you but with any luck you’ll each come through just fine.

Coolest Mage Spec: A guide to 5.0.4 Frost Mages

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 18:37:00 +0000

Oh Frost spec. You and I have done our dance for a long time now and we’ve seen many highs and many more lows throughout our WoW love affair. We have been mocked for choosing each other but those people never understood the power of Frost. They didn’t let us raid with them and it was ok, because you and I were better than them and we knew it. We were once the top dog in Vanilla but when BC came out, we were left behind by the other two specs. It was ok because we had our water elemental (Aquamus Prime)and we were still feared in pvp. In Wrath we were given more fight control talents but our dps was miles behind most other classes. Our new ability, deep freeze, only froze things in place for a few seconds and on mobs that were immune to it, it was wasted. Eventually it was made to do damage on immune mobs and seeing high crits on bosses was nice but we were still a rare sight in raids.

When leveling, many mages went frost because it made leveling a lot easier to have a damage shield and plenty of crowd controllability. As soon as most frost mages hit level cap, they’d usually pick a different spec. Why bother playing a class that you enjoy if it can’t bring the dps you need in raids? Because of the high number of leveling frost mages who didn’t understand the class or how to play it right, most people assumed that frost was a lost cause and that only baddies played frost at level cap.
In Cata, that sadly didn’t change much. Sure we could do nice dps but a simple respec to a different spec would double or triple the dps of most mages with barely any thought. The few frost mages out there who raided worked hard on their rotations, spec, gems/enchants to do the most dps they could. But why? Why play a low dps class? Why not respect to something else? My answer: because I enjoy playing frost. When I run a random and get people talking smack about frost mages and low dps, I enjoy showing them up on the dps meters. It’s my $15 and I will play whatever class brings me the most enjoyment.

Anyway, that’s the history of Frost Mages in WoW up to now. Let’s talk about something exciting now: the MoP changes to the class. Even though the new class changes have only been out a day or so, I am LOVING the changes made to the class. The worst thing I have to say is that I am not happy that deep freeze no longer does damage to immune mobs so it is no longer our hardest hitting ability against bosses. Boo urns.

What’s changed:
-    Deep Freeze no longer does damage to immune mobs.
-    Water Elemental now has a shorter summon cooldown, 1 minute down from 3.
-    Frost Orb is now a frost only ability, before frost mages had to put a point into a talent to turn flame orb into frost orb.
-    Brain Freeze no longer uses up Fingers of Frost charges and Brain Freeze procs will only come from Bomb use.
-    Frostfire is now your first dps ability and it is gained at level 1. You get frostbolt at level 12 and if you spec frost, you never get access to fireball or arcane missiles.
-    Frost, Molten, and Mage armors now grant an increase to a stat. Molten = 5% crit, Frost = 5% haste, and Mage = 893 mastery.

What’s new:
-    Casting Frostbolt on your Water Elemental will now heal it.
-    Frost gets its very own frost version of living bomb called Frost Bomb.
-    Scorch has a chance of proc’ing Fingers of Frost.
-    You automatically learn new abilities when you ding. No more having to go back to a trainer to buy new abilities. Trainers are still around but they are there for learning dual spec and resetting all your talents.

Quick and Dirty Talents:
With the new talent trees, you no longer have to worry about picking talents that increase the damage done by your ice lance or reduce the cooldown of an ability. There are no more spec specific talent abilities like improved blizzard or piercing chill. Talents like that are now baked into the class automatically now. The new talent tree offer abilities that are very situational and if you need to change a talent, you can just buy a vendor item and change the talent without having to hit up your trainer.

Currently this is my Mage’s talent tree:

Talents are changeable and you can have a different opinion than mine! The spirit of the new talent trees is that there is no wrong talent tree build! But here’s why I picked what I picked for each tier.

Tier 1:
Presence of Mind is a cool ability but it limits you to only one insta-cast ability and Ice Floes lets you move and cast 2 spells every minute which is nifty for movement heavy fights but I think Scorch will be a bigger dps increase because it allows you to use scorch while moving which is helpful any time you have to move. Scorch also has a chance of proc’ing Fingers of Frost which are awesome. Think of fights like Morchok when moving to crystals or on Gunship when moving to the large purple circles, you can be scorching all the things while moving.

Tier 2:
Temporal Shield sounds nifty but it requires you to take damage during its 4 second duration. In 4 seconds you can take a hell of a lot of damage and die before you start getting healed from it. To me Blazing Speed sounds like more of a pvp talent or an ability that you pick when you are assigned kiting duty. I picked Ice Barrier because not taking damage is always awesome and being able to help healers out by not taking damage that has to be healed is double awesome. Right now my Ice Barrier absorbs about 50k which if I’m low on health, can definitely save my life. Ice Barrier has a 1 minute duration and only a 30 second cooldown which means you can keep it active forever and ever!

Tier 3:
This tier is all about crowd control and is a great example of a personal choice tier. You can pick any of the three talents and do just fine. Ring of Frost hasn’t changed and is still a 2 second cast that lasts 10 seconds. It’s useful if you need to hold mobs in place and you know where they are going to go. Frostjaw is similar to Deep Freeze, it silences and freezes the target in place for 8 seconds but it has a 1.5 second cast. I picked Ice Ward because I rarely used Ring of Frost since I had my pet’s freeze and Frostjaw is Deep Freeze with a cast time. Ice Ward is a buff you can toss on anyone in the group/raid and when they take damage, it freezes all attackers within 10 yards for 5 seconds. It has a 20 second cooldown and lasts for 30 so you can keep reapplying as necessary. I toss it on a healer so if they pull healing agro on adds they can freeze any attackers and they’ll have 5 seconds to get away from the frozen mobs.

Tier 4:
Greater Invisibility is neat upgrade to Invisibility that makes it instant and reduces any damage you take while invisible by 90%. Cauterize has been fixed so that it no longer kills you if you don’t get a heal when burning. It causes any attack that would kill you to bring you to 50% of your max health but it also puts a dot on you that does damage equal to 40% of your health for 6 seconds. The dot used to do more damage and would kill you if you didn’t get a heal. Both of these are cool and can come in handy but I chose Cold Snap. Cold Snap finishes the cooldown on Ice Block, Frost Nova, and Cone of Cold and also heals you for 30% of your max health.

Tier 5:
This tier is all about bombs. Nether Tempest is an Arcane bomb that explodes on one target and hits a nearby target for 50% of the damage. Living Bomb is still the same spell it was before this patch, dot that blows up at the end of its duration and hits 3 targets. I picked Frost Bomb because it does damage like the other two bomb types when it blows up but it hits all targets nearby and it is slows targets by 70% for 2 seconds. While each bomb type has a chance of proc’ing Brain Freeze, I like the fact that there doesn’t appear to be a limit on how many targets Frost Bomb can hit.

Tier 6:
Since we aren’t level 90 yet, I haven’t been able to play with this tier yet. I think Invocation looks to be a good dps talent because of the 25% extra spell damage you get after evocating. Incanter’s Ward gives you a shield that when it disappears causes you to gain 30% increased spell damage and it will restore 18% of your mana if it absorbs damage. I’m thinking of choosing Rune of Power which creates a rune that you stand in which causes you to regenerate 100% more mana and deal 15% increased damage. It has a 6 second cooldown and lasts 1 minute. Each can be good depending on the fight you’re on. For heavy movement fights, Incanter’s Ward will probably be best as long as you’re taking damage so that you can get the asbsorb mana.

Stats:
I’ve looked into what stat priority we should have for frost and after getting hit capped, it seems to be a little conflicted depending on which site you go to. I believe that Haste will probably edge out over Crit because so many of our abilities have high Crit modifiers already. Stacking a lot of crit will mean higher amounts of frostbolt crits but our Ice lance, Frostfire bolt, and Frost Bomb abilities won’t benefit from that heavy Crit stacking. Our passive ability Shatter, doubles the critical chance of our spells against frozen targets and adds an additional 50%. That means if you have 20% Crit and your target is frozen, you will crit as if you have 90% Crit. Your 20% Crit doubled would be 40% and Shatter adds another 50%, so you get 90%. We crit a lot.

Since Crit isn’t that useful, we can stack Haste which allows us to cast more spells in a shorter amount of time.
Hit Cap is now 15% which is 1537 Hit Rating for non Draenei, who only need 1435 or 14%. Damn space goats and their 1% bonus hit racial! As usual getting hit capped is your number one priority. Once you get hit 15% hit, you can reforge additional hit into other stats.

Our mastery Frostburn causes our spells to deal 16% more damage to frozen targets and increases damage done by our water elemental by 16%. Each point of mastery ups this damage. At the moment seems be our worst ability. We’re better off stacking haste or even crit and mastery will probably be reforged into one of these two stats.

Stat Priority
My suggested stat priority:

Int > Hit rating > Haste > Crit(to 25%) > Mastery

Like I said this is what I suggest and if you want to switch Haste with Crit and aim for 25% Crit before going for Haste that could work too. I’m no number cruncher so I don’t have any hard numbers to show why stats are prioritized the way they are. If you are, please feel free to let me know what you find out and I’ll gladly update this priority list to show proper information.

Rotation:
Our rotation is not that different from what it used to be:
1.    Frost Bomb/Living Bomb/Nether Tempest
2.    Frozen Orb
3.    Frostfire Bolt if you get a Brain Freeze proc
4.    Ice Lance if you have Fingers of Frost procs
5.    Frostbolt

Always aim for having Frost Bomb and Frozen Orb on cooldown and remember to use your pet’s Freeze to proc a Finger of Frost charge. If you freeze more than 1 target you’ll get 2 charges. At 90 I would imagine you would cast your tier 6 ability before starting your rotation but since we don’t have that yet, this rotation will work just fine. Also remember to use your mirror images and icy veins when you need to increase your dps, usually this is during a hard burn phase or an execute phase on bosses.

So that’s pretty much it. Frost has been and always will be an awesome spec and Blizzard has FINALLY decided to increase its pve damage. Compared to the other two specs, it may do slightly less damage but the difference is minor especially considering how huge the gap between the specs once was. According to simulations all three specs are within 2-3k dps of each other. Remember to play the spec you want to play and don’t disregard Frost mages!

Stay Frosty my friends.

Looking Back and Moving Forward

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 20:21:00 +0000

We have a week to go before the 5.0.4 patch drops and about a month before Mists of Pandaria is finally released. Between then and now we have to do two things: relearn how to play our characters with the new MoP talents and secondly, decide if the new game changes have made the game more or less fun. Hopefully most of you are in the more fun category but I know that for a few of you, the game has lost its grasp on your interest. Don't worry my dear readers, I have played the beta and am firmly in the still fun category. I look forward to seeing everything Pandaria has to offer and having a great time with my guild running new dungeons, raids, and scenarios.

With so many new and exciting features like pet battles and scenarios, I believe that there is enough to keep me interested and playing WoW until the next expansion. I know some people are looking forward to one feature above all others, the pet battles! For others they are looking forward to Pandas and monks.

But as I said, for some the game has taken a turn that they don't like. For some of these people the game is not the same game they fell in love with. For some real life has intruded (as it does) and while they sadly would love to play the game, they are unable to do so because of real life. Perhaps some have found a different game that now holds the place in their heart that WoW once used to occupy. They have decided to jump ship and are not looking back.

There is also a third group that is on the fence between each group, waiting, watching, and unsure of anything WoW related. They see some things that they like in MoP but they also see some things that they don't like. There are a few things keeping them playing WoW but they could walk away at the drop of a hat if they so decide. For these people, all it will take for them to leave is one thing that they don't like or agree with and they will make their decision.

Why am I even talking about this when the patch drops next week and everyone is talking about bucket lists and gear guides? Well I was thinking(as I do from time to time) about the expansion and the reaction people have had to it and I began thinking of my guild and how some people have slowed the amount of time they spend in game. Some have taken a break until the expansion and some are just playing alts because they don't want to do anything on their mains. It's that time when people need a break to recharge their batteries. Cataclysm has left many of our members feeling ready for something new. I started thinking about how my guild has weathered this expansion.

In September the Cataclysm expansion will have been out for a year and nine months. In that time we've seen 3 separate raid tiers, dozens of new dailies added, 5 new heroics added, and plenty of reputation grinds. I know this expansion has been rough on our raid team but in the end we finished the expansion as victors. We had roster issues plague us all during tier 11 because of the difficulty in running gearing people to raid and also because the raids required so much damn interrupting! Nothing was worse than wiping on a boss because someone didn't interrupt a spell on Cho'gall or Maloriak or any of the other million interruptible raid wiping spells. (We didn't really have people stop playing because of interrupts but it was super annoying.)

By the time tier 12 launched, we had cleared Bastion of Twilight and killed all but Nefarion in Blackwing Descent. We hadn't stepped foot inside Throne of the Four Winds but when we finally did, we cleared it just fine. We rode into Firelands feeling pretty happy about our progression. Unfortunately in Firelands we struggled. We had attendance issues, roster issues, and we even lost one of our oldest tanks who had enough fire and quit the game. (Tuna we miss you and hope you come back one day!). From what I've seen around the blogosphere, Firelands broke a lot of guilds. (I guess people had enough of fire and red zones) To overcome the Fireland blues, we did what we always do: we persevered and overcame our issues. We recruited and some people switch characters so we could have the right group makeup to continue. It was a tough time but we eventually bounced back and ended the tier 6/7. No Ragnaros kill but after everything we went through during the tier, I'm ok with it.

When tier 13 came around, we went into the LFR and twilight heroics for gear, fun times, and points and we killed Deathwing. It wasn't a first or second week kill but it was a kill and more importantly it was a kill before they nerfed DS into the ground. I think tier 13 was the best Cata tier for our guild. After the nightmare that was Firelands, it seemed that Dragon Soul was lighter and more fun for us. During this tier we achieved a lot: we were able to get the legendary daggers for one of our rogues, we pulled in all sorts of cool people from twitter into the guild, and I was able to get my Mage his legendary staff. I livestreamed some of our DS raids and some of the viewers were able to see what I was talking about when I say that we have a fun time raiding. A big surprise for me was the fact that we not only cleared the tier when it was current and relevant, we also killed a few heroic bosses in DS.

We ended the expansion on a high point and for that I am definitely proud of my guild and all our members. Go team! *air fist pump*

Although we are done raiding until the next expansion we are still doing fun run raids for achievements and silliness while we wait for the expansion. I look forward to battling my guild's pet teams and running scenarios with them for the first time. To the people who are not playing WoW anymore I say goodbye and have a good journey doing whatever it is that makes you happy. To those who are staying I say right on! And to those who are looking to join in on the fun, I say welcome to the fold.

*Obligatory Recruitment Link* We're totes recruiting fun people for the expansion. If you over the age of 18, alliance, and are looking to raid casually or would like a guild where you can just socialize with people in gchat while leveling an alt or profession farming, check us out at www.avengersofazeroth.com We can always use a few more fun lovers. #OccupyUrsin *Obligatory Recruitment Link*

Legendary Encounters

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 17:33:00 +0000

6 months of spending Saturday nights raiding, about 20 actual raids, countless wipes. In the end what did I get out of it? Well that’s easy to answer. I got to spend 20 nights have a great time with some really fun and awesome people. Oh and I also got a legendary staff that is full of awesomeness and win.

Why did it take 6 months to get a legendary for my mage? Well I went through the Twitterland Raiding community which is composed of people from twitter. We didn’t always have the same raid roster every night so we had to spend a lot of time explaining fights and figuring out why people were dying. Sometimes we didn’t even have enough people signed up so we had to spend time trying to pull people into the raid from twitter/real id friends lists and that ate into the raid time. Both of these reasons caused us to not always down every boss each raid night which led to not getting the maximum number of eternal embers/seething cinders/smouldering essences.

I decided to go through Twitter because one night in February(the 18th to be precise) someone else was running a Firelands run and I wanted to join it. Sadly I did not but while I was waiting to hear back I was in the Twitter Mumble server talking to Oestrus who decided that we should just organize our own group. This led to a lot of tweeting and real id friending and before I knew it, we had a Firelands raid. We had a great time and I met a lot of new and fun people who wanted to run Firelands with me whenever I ran it.

I wrote a post about running Firelands with Twitter people back in February and how much fun I had. Looking back at it now, I have had even more fun since then. Not long into the Firelands runs I decided to take a page from my vanilla playbook and spend the night drinking and killing fire bosses. Back in vanilla, I ran Molten Core with the guild on Saturday nights and several guildees and I would drink together and have a great time killing stuff. With Firelands feeling like Molten Core 2.0 I clearly needed to drink! This quickly spread amongst some of the raid members and became our Saturday night tradition. I would drink and some people would join me and we’d have a good time. If we didn’t down everything, well at least we had a damn good time.

I definitely could not have done this alone and so I get to the most important part of this post. This is the part where I thank everyone who showed up to the raid whether it was just once or whether they were there every single night. A big thank you to the following: Rowann, Oestrus, Poneria, Hestiah, Asherrylie, Hempia, Velidra, Rooster, Dee, Lemon, Sidecar, Rofer, Rilandune, Exlucis, Ekinara, Aero, Pix, Kia, Saz, Munificence, Thyro, Penguin, Stellery, Megs, Haitia, Askevi, Lurien, Matticus, Macaroni, Kitsuno, Sikaros, Finalflame, and everyone in my guild who tried to down rag for me. If I missed your name please let me know and I will gladly add you to the list!

If anyone would like to watch the Livestream I did of the turning in ceremony you can click here.

Ursin Adventures

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 14:54:00 +0000

I had asked Exlucis to write a guest post for me and he did an awesome job at it. I meant to post this over the weekend when I originally got it but since I was at a Comic Convention, I didn't get the chance. So you get it today! I'll try to get out the next part of the story later this week.

When Jed asked me to do a guest post on his blog, I was honored. Then I was hungry, so I made a sandwich. After the sandwich I felt nervous; not because of the mayo or anything like that. I wasn’t sure what I would write about.

It’s easy to write about myself and stuff about me, because I am familiar with myself and what I’m dealing with, and how all of that coincides with gaming. What could I use from my knowledge that I could apply to Jed’s blog? I considered spinning a yarn of my own, about Jedem and Oslis, adding to the tale. I considered writing about the effect an enthralling story has in our interactions in Azeroth, both with the game and each other. I considered writing a biopic about Jed himself. I decided to write about the gnomish death race instead. Or rather, where the race itself took place.

For those unfamiliar, Jed is the GM of Avengers of Azeroth, an alliance guild on the Ursin server. Ursin is a PvP server and is one of the least populated servers running. No joke, look at some numbers. While it’s not the lowest pop, Ursin is down there, and (allegedly) over half the population is Horde. Having leveled up there recently, I can honestly say it was one of the most interesting experiences ever. Let me tell you about it.

I decided to make a hunter, Exlukiss. Exlukiss because many people used to pronounce my main phonetically. That is to say, many people would pronounce Exlucis as Ex-Loo-Kiss. I pronounce it Ex-Loo-Sis but it really doesn’t make a difference. Exlukiss was funny; a goofy looking human hunter that made Avengers his home, on account of a couple of wonderful friends leveling some toons there. We didn’t start at the same time, nor did we finish, but I really enjoyed the journey. (1-60 that is)

As a human I primarily leveled on the Eastern Kingdoms continent, going abroad only for tabards and a couple dungeon quests. I didn’t want to get ganked, and I still saw Kalimdor as Horde territory. I would save my journeys over there for Hyjal and Uldum. So while I missed out on Un’goro and Felwood, I did experience Western and Eastern Plaguelands, Duskwood, and Stranglethorn Vale.

Stranglethorn Vale is, apparently, where little adventurers go to die. In other words, they get ganked and camped. Despite the initial fears, I could not resist the chance to tame rares and experience a refreshed southern EK. Besides, the server (especially the 1-60 content) was mostly deserted; what could possibly go wrong?

Well... I got ganked. By what I assume was a Level 85 Blood Elf Rogue, her name I never remembered. I assume she was turning in some Bloodsail Rep, when I came across her path. She vanished. I knew what was coming and did what I thought would be the best course of action: I played dead. Turns out Feign Death doesn’t work as well as a decoy in pvp situations. I died near instantly. While I wasn’t discouraged initially, I was more so when I returned to my body and saw the rogue still there. I popped back to life and begged for mercy. She came closer when suddenly...

/kiss

I was quite pleased. We flirted and danced, and she bid me adieu before hearthing back to wherever her home was. It was quite an experience, being ganked and having a random spontaneous WoW moment. I think a lot of people take these moments for granted; the spontaneous, random moments that happen on occasion, that truly shock you or make your day. Most people (like me) want to level to cap as fast as possible because “that’s where the game starts”. But exploring new content, with a different set of eyes, with a different mind frame, can be quite remarkable.

It can also be quite profitable, for not 10 minutes later I possessed the rare Hyacinth MaCaw. That birdie was kind enough to pay for my epic flying, and I am thankful for having found it. I wish other avenues of income were as successful on Ursin.

Speaking of Ursin, I never was ganked in my leveling time after STV. Not even through the 80-85 content. I assume that come Mists that will change, but I will have cover to help me out through any and all gank attempts. Which leads me to one other note I want to make.

Avengers of Azeroth has been around 7 years. I was in a guild that was around for nearly as long, back on Zangarmarsh, when I first started playing, called Ares. Ares has seen many changes over the years; new members, new GMs, new policies, new voice clients, etc. The spirit always remained, that is until Cataclysm. The GMs I had known and become friends with left Azeroth for good. It was then that my main, Exlucis, made his way through many avenues, over to Horde on Malfurion, then back to Alliance on Azuremyst, with Eff the Ineffable. But what about my alts? Where would they call home?

Avengers of Azeroth is their home. Ursin is their home. But it’s more than just a storage bin for my alts and side projects. Avengers of Azeroth is part of my family. Original members, great twitter friends, and raid mates from my main’s server (Go EtI), all have toons in AoA. Jed is a great host, and the members of that guild are some of the greatest I have come to know in game. Always willing to run with you, always willing to help with a gank, always cracking jokes in Vent, and doing wild things, like the Gnomish Death Race, commemorating 7 years of solidarity.

Jed has led them through tough times, both for himself and for the guild. He is a great GM, a good raid leader, a fun guy to raid with, and a great man to confide in. I am thankful for having a chance to know him. I am even more thankful for having an opportunity to write for him. Jed, thank you for the memories, and thank you for giving me a home in this World of Warcraft. I look forward to many more as Mists rolls around. For everyone else, I leave these parting words: Embrace the pandamonium! Occupy Ursin!

Adventure Times

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 19:10:00 +0000

I know this is late and I have no excuse other than the fact that I was suffering from a case of serious writers block. Thankfully I was able to overcome it and I figured out what I wanted to say for this part AND the next part! For now, enjoy! =D

“Fine! I suppose we can wait for you to get us in but you better make sure we don’t wait all day Elling,” Jedem said. “We’ll be at the Pig and Whistle Tavern. Come along Oslis; let’s give Elling some time to work his magic.”

“Ye had mae at tavern,” Oslis responded.

“Watch yourself in Old Town Jedem,” Elling warned. “By now word of your arrival in town has probably spread across Stormwind and you-know-who will want to have a word with you.”

“He would probably like to do more than have a word,” Jedem said. “But that can’t be helped now.”

“You take care of yourself Jedem,” Elling said. “It has been nice seeing you alive and I would hate to have this be the last time we talked. You owe me a few stories regarding what you’ve been up to the past few years.”

“Goodbye Elling,” Jedem said as he exited through the office door with Oslis at his side.

“I’m serious about being careful Jedem,” Elling said as the pair walked down the stairs.

“I’ll be fine,” Jedem replied. “And besides, it’s not like we’re going to wander around lost in the Old Town. If anything does happen, I do have a battle tested dwarf to protect me after all.”

“Ha! Laddae ye better nae be leading me into trouble,” Oslis said as he reached the bottom of the stairs. ”Or it’ll be me that ye have to worry aboot.”

“Looks like you’re in good hands,” Elling said as he laughed, clapping Jedem on the back. “You two take care and watch for my messenger. I think you should leave your mounts here and walk to the Old Town to avoid any more attention.”

“It better nae be a long walk,” Oslis said.

“Don’t worry, Oslis. It is a short trip even for a dwarf,” Elling responded. “You may also want to leave your pet here as well. It’s a rather large attention getter.”

The pair walked out of the cheese shop and pulled the items that they needed from their horses. Oslis told the wolf to stay put and the two began the short walk to the tavern. When they crossed the canal bridge into the Old Town area, Jedem stopped and looked around.

“Do ye see anything?” Oslis asked.

“No I don’t,” Jedem answered. “But I have a feeling that there is more than one pair of eyes watching us. We better hurry to the tavern and wait for the messenger from Elling.”

The two walked into the Old Town and headed towards the tavern. When it was almost in sight, the two noticed that all the normal city noises had suddenly stopped.

“It’s very quiet,” Oslis said.

“It’s a little too quiet. I think you should prepare yourself, just in case,” Jedem warned quietly. “I’d rather that we get to the tavern and feel foolish for worrying than to not be ready for a fight. I’d like to avoid a fight as much as you do.”

“It’s a little too late for that!” a voice suddenly called out from nowhere.

“So much for that idea,” Jedem said. “Come out where we can see you! Unless you’re afraid of a fight.”

“It’s you who should be afraid,” another voice said from behind him.

A braying laughter suddenly began from their left side.

“Oh no,” Jedem said.

“What’s tha matter?” Oslis asked as he looked around trying to see who the voices belong to.

“I’d know that laugh anywhere,” Jedem answered. “Come on out Badger. We don’t have to do this.”

“The hell we don’t Jedem. You should have stayed gone,” Badger said as he emerged from a darkened doorway. He had a weasel like face, a large irritating smile, and was wearing a bowler hat. “You should have known that you once you made him your enemy, it would never be safe for you to come back.”

“Look I don’t want any trouble, I just want to go about my business.” Jedem said. “Just let us through peacefully and no one will have to do anything that they will regret.”

“I don’t think so. He wants to see you but he never said that we can’t have a little fun bringing you to him,” Badger said with an evil look in his eyes. He whistled in three short bursts and suddenly several rough looking men appeared all around Jedem.

“Trust me you don’t want to do this,” Jedem warned.

“Oh but I do,” Badger said. “He doesn’t have time for people like you, who botch a job and run at the first sign of a guard. That job cost him a lot of money.”

“It wasn’t just one guard and you know it,” Jedem replied. “I can pay him for what he lost just let me go and I’ll make sure he gets it.”

“Oh. Well that changes everything,” Badger said. “Give it to me and I’ll make sure that he gets it.”

“I don’t have it with me,” Jedem said.

“Shame. If you had, I’d have had your gold and the pleasure of knowing I got to hurt you,” Badger said cruelly. “My boys and I have been looking forward to hurting you for a long time.”

“Yes, I’ll bet you have,” Jedem said.

Suddenly from behind, one of the men threw a punch at the back of Jedem’s head. He shifted his weight and leaned his body to the left so that the punch hit nothing but air. Jedem grabbed the goon’s arm and pull him with all his might, sending the attacker flying through the air into another of the men.

While Jedem was busy, one of the other men grabbed Oslis from behind and picked him up in a fierce bear hug. Oslis tried squirming out of it but he saw that he was effectively trapped as the man started tightening his grip. The man had lifted him high enough that their heads were almost lined up and Oslis decided to do the only thing he could: he head butted the man as hard as he could. The attacker cried out in pain, took a step back, and dropped the dwarf who turned quickly and slammed his fist into the man’s stomach, doubling him over. Clasping both hands together, Oslis used them to uppercut the man and knock him down.

“I’ll say this for ye mage, ye’re definitely not a boring person to be around,” Oslis said as he threw himself at the nearest attacker.

Jedem punched one guy in the face with all his might and was rewarded with the sight of the man dropping to the ground unconscious. “I’d save the humor until we get out of this mess.”

Oslis was about to reply when he was picked up by two of the attackers and thrown into a wall. The dwarf hit the wall hard but he managed to get up to face his attackers. He pulled something from his pocket and brought it up to his mouth. The two men approaching him stopped and looked at each other in confusion over what the dwarf was doing. They began slowly edging their way to the dwarf when suddenly a shadow appeared above them.

Bad Wolf landed on both men and growled loudly. The men were too frightened of the wolf to do anything but stare.

“Good boy,” Oslis said to the dog as he got up. He kicked each of the men in the face, knocking them out.

The remaining four attackers took a few steps back, unsure if they wanted to join the fight. “Get in there and beat them or I’ll make you sorry that you were born!” Badger yelled at them.

“Looks like they fear us more than they fear you and your threats,” Jedem said. One of the men decided to charge him. The man grabbed Jedem around waist and lifted him to slam into the ground. Jedem clasped his hands together and brought them down on the man’s back causing the attacker to release his hold on Jedem. Jedem brought up his knee to the man’s stomach. When the attacker bent over in pain, Jedem spun and threw a roundhouse kick at the man’s head, knocking him to the ground and out of the fight.

Oslis didn’t wait for the remaining men to attack and jumped at one of them, knocking them to the ground. He threw several punches as he fell and rolled away to quickly stand up. Bad Wolf pounced on the fallen attacker and kept the scared man down. One of the other men tried rushing Oslis from behind but the dwarf dodged out of the way and kicked at the attacker’s knee. He was rewarded with a loud cracking sound followed by the sound of a body hitting the floor

The last remaining attacker was standing back watching his friends get beaten and he turned and ran away. “Get back here you worm!” Badger yelled at the running man’s back. “You’ll be sorry you ran!”

Amidst the fallen attacker’s bodies, Jedem and Oslis looked at each out. “You ok dwarf?” Jedem asked.

“Fine enough ta catch a badger fer breakfast,” Oslis replied.

“Looks like it’s just you and us now Badger,” Jedem said.

Jedem and Oslis started walking towards Badger when suddenly he pulled a crossbow out of bag and aimed it at Jedem. Badger than said “Wrong again; it’s just you. Now back away from me.”

“Easy now Badger, you don’t need to hurt anyone,” Jedem said as he backed away. “Besides you’ll only be able to get one shot off before we get to you and I remember your aim being horrible.”

“One shot is all I’ll need to end your miserable life,” Badger said as he edged his way around all the bodies. “Will you take that risk?”

“We can rush him laddae,” Oslis said. “He’ll nae be able to stop us before we can get him.”

Do you let Badger go or do you rush him?

Pandas and you

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 14:04:00 +0000

So with Mists of Pandaria having a release date of 9/25/12 we are now faced with the fun task of preparing for the expansion that will be here before we know it. What does this mean for you? Well now is a great time for someone to decide to switch who their main raiding character is going to be. This character wont be the character you'll be forced to play for the rest of the expansion, it'll just be the character that you are focused on leveling to 90 first. If you mainly played a healer this expansion and want to raid tank or just focus on dps, this expansion is the perfect excuse to make that switch.

For me I know that I'll be leveling my mage AND my pally at the same time but focusing on the mage since he is always my first max level capped alt. The pally will be my raid main so he will be who I raid progression stuff with, as usual. I know that I'll be make a panda monk on my main account and that I'll be race changing my mini-mage to a panda because panda mages, like fezzes and bow ties, are cool.

I also plan on running around pet battling the hell out of everyone on my main mage because he is my pet/mount collector and I wants me some more achievement points! I suppose I should make a bucket list now that I know I have a deadline for it so expect to see that post somewhere down the line.

What about the rest of you? Who will you all be leveling to 90 first? Is anyone going to be rolling a panda monk and power leveling that to 90?

The Seven Year Itch

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 19:32:00 +0000

Once upon a time in WoW, there was a stubborn guy who was abandoned by all his friends on a brand new server. Instead of despairing and following them, this super stubborn fella decided to create a guild and show all his supposed friends that they were wrong for leaving him behind. From this stubbornness something was created that has continued to thrive to this day: the Avengers of Azeroth guild. I’m sure that some of you read that last sentence and probably thought to yourselves “wait all this over some dumb video game guild?” To those people I respond with: YES NOW SHUT UP AND LET ME CONTINUE!

Why am I rambling about my guild yet again? Well because it's the bee's knees duh! Also because we have officially turned 7 years old today July 24th. Our server was opened on July 23, 2005 and my guild came into existence the next day. We would have started that first day but I wasn't able to get enough people to sign my charter until the next day. As it stands now, my guild is the oldest active guild on the server. There is only one older guild on the server but they are not really active and so my guild > theirs.

To celebrate we are going to be holding one of our super awesome traditional events: a Gnomish Death Race! This year its going to be an Outland style race, from Shattrath to Honor Hold. The race will start at 5pm Central Standard Time and will probably go for about an hour or so. We will provide a Ventrilo server for all the racers to join us before the race to facilitate invites and such.

Sounds amazingly awesome right? Want to attend the race? Well all you have to do is roll a level 1 gnome on the Ursin-PvP server and send a whisper to Jedem or anyone online in Avengers of Azeroth. The race is always a fun time and some people go all out with their racers by sending themselves vanity pets and fashionable white gear. No heirlooms are allowed in the race as they provide an unfair advantage since not everyone has easy access to them.

For anyone who can't make the race but would like to watch it, I will be streaming it live: http://www.livestream.com/jedsstream

Its a race...of DEATH! I hope to see you all at the race!

Continuing Adventures

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 02:43:00 +0000

Sorry for the delay, between the holiday and illness I've been a little occupied. Well enough of my excuses here is the next part! Enjoy!

The mage looked at the dwarf and realized that he would not be able to win this argument. He resigned himself to going along with the dwarf. “Fine. We’ll go to SI:7 first and after that’s over with, I’ll be going about my business,” the mage told the dwarf. “I’m sure that they are more experienced in matters involving finding assassins.”

“Aye, they should be,” Oslis responded.

“Since we can’t very well barge into SI:7 and demand someone talk to us about what happened, we’ll have to visit someone who can get us an audience with the right people,” the mage informed the dwarf. “Can your wolf behave itself inside the city? If not you’ll probably have to find somewhere to stash it while we deal with this situation.”

“He can handle himsel’ just fine around people as long as they don’t get too close,” Oslis responded. “If anything happens, there are some o’ ma people in the Dwarven district of town that can take care o’ him until we’re done here.”

The pair rode their mounts into the city as it was starting to wake up. Vendors were starting to open their shops preparing to display their wares for all to see. The two moved quickly. The mage stopped them in front of what appeared to be a cheese shop.

“This is where we’re going?” the dwarf asked. “A cheese shop? We need tae find out why Plazlo died, not waste time on breakfast!”

“Calm yourself dwarf!” The mage replied. “Dismount and follow me inside. Or you can stay out here and watch our mounts, it doesn’t matter to me. The faster I can deal with this problem, the sooner I can go back to my business.”

“Fine fine I’ll go into the cheese shop with ye but if ye’re wasting oor time, I’m going to be very angry,” the dwarf said as he turned to this wolf. “Bad Wolf, Ah’ve tied up our horses here, ye watch out for thum and make sure that no one tries to steal thum. If there’s any trouble, ye come get me.”

The wolf looked at the dwarf, growled, and promptly laid down by the mounts. The dwarf and mage proceeded to walk into the shop.

“Whatever happens, do not say anything. Let me handle this.” The mage told the dwarf.

“As long as ye don’t waste any more time,” the dwarf responded. “I’ll trust ye for now anyway.”

“Hello and welcome to Trias’ Cheese. You’re our first customer of the day. How can we help you?” a young man standing behind the counter asked.

“We’re here to see Elling,” the mage informed the young man.

“He isn’t available at the moment, is there anything I can help you with?” the youth answered.

The mage looked at the youth and said loudly “Find Elling and tell him Jedem is here! You better do it NOW!”

From a room in the back a voice yelled out “Now then what’s all this commotion about? Are we going to have to call the guards?”

An older man walked into the shop and looked at the dwarf and mage. “Well, well if it isn’t Jedem. And here I thought you’d have perished by now with all the adventures you’ve been off having,” the man said.

“I might just perish in your store if you keep me waiting any longer, Elling,” Jedem responded.

“Well we wouldn’t want to waste any of your precious time now would we? What do you want?” Elling asked. “And hurry up with your explanation. I have a shop to maintain and products to sell.”

“This is sensitive business that shouldn’t be discussed in such a public place. Let’s go somewhere more private,” Jedem said.

“Is it now?” Elling asked. “Let’s go upstairs to my office and if you’re wasting my time, you will regret it. Ben, watch the store until Elaine comes back from her errands. If you need anything you shout for me.”

“Yes sir,” Ben said as he watched the three walk up the stairs into the office.

Once all three were through the doorway into the office, Elling closed the door, turned to Jedem, and smiled. “It’s been so long since we’ve heard from you. We really did think you were dead,” Elling said.

“I’ve unfortunately been so busy with everything going on that I never had a moment to send word,” Jedem said with a smile on his face as well he hugged Elling.

“Whit’s going on?” Oslis asked the other two. “One minute ye two are about to throw down and fight and the next ye’re best of friends.”

“Ha ha ha. I like your friend here, Jedem,” Elling said.

“Traveling companion would be a better description. I just met him last night,” Jedem said. “Elling Trias, allow me to introduce Oslis of Ironforge.”

“Hello good dwarf. I am sorry for the deception but it was necessary to keep up the appearance Jedem is not on, well let's say, friendly terms with most citizens of Stormwind,” Elling explained. “As you can see, that is far from the truth.”

“I think I understand but I have no idea why,” the dwarf answered confused.

“Trust me when I say that it’s for the best this way,” Elling said. “Now then what can I help you with?”

Jedem explained the bizarre circumstances that brought the two to see Elling. When he finished he said, “And now you can see why we need to talk to someone in SI:7 about this dagger.”

“I see,” Elling responded as he processed all the information given to him. “I should be able to arrange someone to meet with you about it. Can I see the dagger?”

“Sure you can,” Jedem said. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the dagger wrapped in cloth. “Just be careful with it, its sharper then it looks. For all we know it could be lined with poison.”

“I know how to handle a knife without slicing myself open,” Elling said as he looked at Jedem. He took the dagger and looked it over carefully. “You’re definitely right about it not being just an ordinary dagger. The hilt on it looks weathered and old but the blade itself appears to have been forged recently. There are no nicks or dings on the edge of the blade and you can’t even see any scratches either. Whoever made this probably expected it to last a long time. You say the dagger was left behind when the attackers fled?

“It was left behind in the poor gnome’s chest. I guess whoever killed him didn’t expect our dwarf friend here to put up quite a fight. When I led the guard back inside they probable expected us to rush them and made their exit quickly,” Jedem answered.

Elling handed the dagger back to Jedem “Something isn’t adding up here. You two definitely need to see someone who can investigate this mystery further. I’ll send word to SI:7 that you’re heading there but I don’t know that they’ll be able to have someone see you quickly. If I were you, I would pass by the inn and have something to eat and before heading over to their headquarters.”

“I have other business to attend to while I’m here. I don’t have hours to wait for someone to see me,” Jedem protested.

“It’s either wait a few hours or try and see if they’ll talk to you on your own. Once they get word from me, they’ll know that you aren’t going to waste their time. I have some clout there but even that can’t get you in to see anyone that fast. It’s your choice,” Elling said.

Do the pair head to SI:7 right away or wait the few hours like Elling Trias suggested?

Continuing Story Adventures

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Wed, 27 Jun 2012 00:02:00 +0000

Jumping out the window was the winning choice last week. So here is the fun story you've been waiting for! As always please leave a comment with your choice for next week's adventure and thanks for reading!

The stranger gathered the few things he has brought in with him and walked to the door. He heard noises outside in the hallway which made him pause. “That doesn’t sound like people leaving the inn because of the fire,” he thought to himself. He heard footsteps coming down the hallway to his door and he took a step back and prepared himself. “Whoever it is, they aren’t getting me without a fight.”

Suddenly the door flew open and two shadowed figures walked into the room. Their weapons were drawn and they seemed ready to use them, which meant that the stranger had little chance of getting out of the room alive. Each figure had what looked like a short sword or possibly a long dagger; It was hard for the stranger to tell in the darkness. The stranger looked behind the two figures and saw that one of the other doors was open and that two more figures were preparing to enter a third room.

“Whatever you want, I’m sure I don’t have it.” The stranger told the two, as he slowly backed up drawing them more into the room. “If you’ll let me be, I’ll be more than glad to let you go about your business.”

The two figures kept moving closer and closer to the stranger. “Guess words aren’t going to get me out of this one. I’ll have to do this quick so I can get out of here before more of them come in here and see what’s holding up their two friends,” the stranger thought.

The stranger faked a step forward towards the figure on the right and when he saw that the figure took a sudden step back, the stranger jumped at the figure on the left. He kicked at his attackers left knee and was rewarded when he heard the sound of a bone breaking .The attacker went down crying out in pain. The second figure swung his sword at the stranger but thankfully for the stranger, the attacker was slow and clumsy with the swing. The stranger had just enough time to step to the side and avoid the attack.

The stranger aimed a punch at the attackers face and after it connected, the stranger grabbed the figure and pushed him towards the room’s window. The attacker slammed into the wall and wobbled a little on his feet. The stranger didn’t give his opponent time to recover, he rushed the attacker and punched him in the stomach causing the figure to drop his sword and double over. The stranger brought his knee up to the attacker’s face and after it connected, the attacker was amazingly still standing.

The stranger heard the sound of people running towards his room and thought “That’ll be more bodies in this room trying to kill me. I need to do something to get out of here and I need to do it right now.”

The stranger looked at his opponent who was getting ready to try and attack the stranger or at least keep him busy enough until his friends could arrive to even the odds. The stranger came up with a quick plan and bent down to pick up the figure’s sword without taking his eyes off his opponent. He swung the sword at the figure but he did it slowly so that the figure had to jump back towards the wall. The stranger threw the sword at the window and grabbed the attacker in a bear hug. He pulled the figure to him and launched both of them out the window. The ground came up rather quickly but the attacker’s body managed to absorb most of the fall damage leaving him seriously hurt.

The stranger slowly stood up and looked around to see that the town had fallen into chaos. Some of the guards and the townspeople were trying to put out the fire before it did any more damage but it looked like they were going to be too late because the fire had spread to the inn. As the stranger was checking himself to make sure that nothing was broken from the fall, a few guards came running at him. In the lead was the same guard from earlier.

“What are you doing?” the guard yelled at the stranger as he looked down at the body on the ground. “What did you do to that guy?”

The guard pointed a sword at the stranger.

“He attacked me and there are more of them up in the inn so instead of trying to stab me, you should go upstairs and check on the other people in there,” the stranger said. “But you better hurry or you won’t find anyone alive before the inn burns down.”

“You and I will go in and look for your so-called attackers,” the guard said as he pulled the stranger into the inn. “Try anything and my guards will kill you before you can leave the building. One of you go let the Marshal know that the inn is in danger and there may be some people trapped inside.”

The guard and the stranger walked into the inn and looked around. It appeared deserted but smoke was slowly starting to creep into the building. The two walked to the kitchen to look for the innkeeper or his assistant. When they opened the door to the kitchen, they found the innkeeper, his assistant, and the cook all unconscious and tied up. They both ran over to the bodies and the guard checked for signs of life.

“They’re alive but knocked out. Grab some water quickly,” The guard yelled at the stranger. Once he was given a water bucket, he splashed some water on the three. All three bodies started moving and coming to life.

“Who… what happened?” The innkeeper asked as the guard untied him. “My head is killing me.”

“We’ll have time later for answers. Gather yourselves and get out now before the fire spreads more,” the guard commanded them.

All three nodded and got up to make their way out of the inn.

“Let’s check upstairs,” the guard said.

“Fine but remember that there were several figures up there and that they are very deadly,” the stranger replied. “So tread carefully because I am not risking my neck for you.”

Together the pair walked up the stairs carefully so as not to make any noise that would alert anyone. When they reached the second floor hallway, they saw that the doors to all the rooms were wide open.

They moved to the closest open door slowly and quietly and looked in.

They saw the body of the dwarf lying on the ground surrounded by obvious signs of struggle. The guard moved to the dwarf’s body and checked it. “He’s alive too. Looks like he is starting to wake up.”

“Wha hit me?” The dwarf asked.

“We were hoping that you could tell us,” the guard answered.

“Where is tha gnome?” The Dwarf yelled. “I woke up to him bein' attacked so I ran out here ta try to save ‘im when I ran intae thae group ‘o bandits.”

The three got up and walked into the next room and found similar signs of struggle but no body. They walked into the last room and they saw a small body that could only belong to a gnome. The gnome had a large dagger buried in his chest and his face had a permanent look of shock.

“Oh nae laddie,” the dwarf said as he ran to the gnome’s body.

“I hate to be the one to ruin this moment but I think we need to make an exit now,” the stranger said as he pointed to the last room. “It looks like the fire is about to move into this hallway and take us with it.”

“Grab the gnome and let’s go!” The guard yelled at the dwarf.

The dwarf snapped out of his sad thoughts and carefully picked up the gnome’s limp body and quickly carried him out. The guard and the stranger ran out behind the dwarf as the fire started spreading along the second floor.

Outside the inn, guards and townsfolk were forming a bucket brigade to put out the fire. The stranger took a look at the fire and thought to himself, “At the rate the fire is moving, they won’t be able to stop the fire before the inn has completely burned to the ground. I need to do something or more people will get hurt fighting this fire.”

“Everyone, stand back!” The stranger yelled at the crowd.

“What do you think you’re doing? Those people need to put out that fire before it spreads any

further!” The guard said.

“Be quiet. I need all my concentration for this.” The stranger snapped. The stranger began making strange gestures and mumbling in an unknown language. The temperature plummeted even with the fire from the inn. The crowd started huddling together for warmth as they stared at the stranger who continued working his magic.

Suddenly it began snowing, gently at first but building up to a fierce blizzard. The stranger pointed a finger at the inn and the blizzard seemed to direct its full force in that area. The fire had no chance against a blizzard of that magnitude and was finally extinguished. Both the inn and the surrounding houses were no longer on fire. The stranger stopped his channeling and breathed a deep sigh of relief as the blizzard dissipated as quickly as it began.

“You’re…you’re a mage!” The guard said in stunned disbelief.

“That’s still none of your business and don’t you forget it. Now let’s take a look at the gnome and see if we can figure out what caused all of this chaos tonight.” The mage said as he walked to where the dwarf was standing over the body.

“Let’s have a good look at the dagger that killed him,” the mage said as he pulled the dagger out of the gnome’s chest.

“Whit dae ye think ye’re doin?” The dwarf forcefully said. “That’s a person not a slab ‘o meat fer yer personal fun.”

The mage ignored the dwarf and his angry shouts and took a good look at the dagger. “He’s dead and nothing I do now will change that. What I can do is try and find out why he was killed now be quiet.” The mage snapped.

“I’ve never seen a knife of this design. This is too elaborate and intricate for a simple bandit to carry with him. Who was this gnome and what did he do to deserve being killed? So many questions that I don’t have answers to.” The mage thought to himself.

“This dagger needs to be taken to Stormwind and given to SI:7 so they can investigate it properly. I’m heading there and since I obviously won’t be getting any more rest tonight, I’ll take it myself,” The mage told the guard. Knowing that he was out of his element, the guard agreed.

“Ah’ll go with ye,” The dwarf said. “He didn’t deserve what happened to im.”

“I don’t have time to waste on taking you with me,” The mage answered.

“Ah dun care. Ye donnae even know his name.” The dwarf said. “Ahm coming with ye and that’s final.”

“Fine! But know this: if you so much as slow me down, I’ll leave you without any hesitation.” The mage reluctantly said. “What was his name by the way?”

“He said he was called Plazlo.” The dwarf said.

“Get your things, we’re leaving…” The mage said.

“Ye kin call me Oslis,” The dwarf answered as he gave a loud whistle. Suddenly a large wolf came strolling out of the woods nearby. “That’s me wolf, Bad.”

“Your wolf is named Bad Wolf?” The mage asked.

‘Ye got a problem with it, talk to im,” The dwarf said as Bad Wolf looked at the mage and growled menacingly.

“Get your mount; I don’t have time for this.” The mage said.

The pair rode through what remained of the night and reached the gates of Stormwind early in the morning. When they rode through the gates the mage looked at the dwarf and said “I have business that I need to take care of before I deal with the dagger. You can stay at the inn until I’m done.”

“Nae. We need ta take care of whoever killed Plazlo. That’s more important,” Oslis replied.

Will the mage take care of his business first or go to SI:7 first?

Adventure Story Time

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 23:39:00 +0000

It seems that last weeks choose my adventure ended with a tie! Talk to the dwarf and eat dinner tied with 4 votes each so I decided to work both into the story. I think I'll leave the voting open up until Monday morning each week when I'll see which option wins and write the next part. Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy this weeks story.

We join our story already in progress:

The stranger looked away before the gnome decided to approach him and try to talk. “Where is my blasted drink?” The stranger thought to himself. “All I want to do is have a drink and be left alone. If not for this blasted weather I would be in Stormwind by now.”

Unfortunately for the stranger, the dwarf noticed that the stranger was sitting at his table staring at nothing in particular and avoiding eye contact and took it as an invitation to walk over and try to start a conversation.

“Ello laddie,” The dwarf said. “Ah reckon that ye look familiar. Do ah know ye from somewhere?”

Luckily for the stranger, the innkeeper walked into the common room with food and drinks. From the look of it, dinner appeared to be roasted quail and flagons of mead. As the innkeeper placed the food down on the table, the stranger thought to himself “Well I suppose this isn’t the worst place to be stuck during a storm. If I can get this dwarf to leave me be, I’ll consider this night a draw.”

The dwarf took one of the flagons of mead and after taking a long swig, looked at the stranger expectantly. “Well do ye speak or ave the kobolds stolen yer tongue?” he asked.

The stranger took a bite of the roasted quail and looked the dwarf in the eyes. He debated whether it would be better to ask the dwarf to go away or to ignore him. Knowing dwarves, he wouldn’t get the hint that the stranger didn’t want to talk. “I’m eating and have no desire to talk.” He told the dwarf.

“Nae reason tae be rude,” the dwarf answered. “Ah jist wanna know why ye seem so familiar.”

The stranger answered the dwarf with the sound of chewing. The innkeeper noticed the exchange and walked over to the dwarf. “Would you like another flagon of mead good dwarf?” he asked in hopes of trying to cut the tension in the room. “If you’ll come back to your table I’ll grab you another and you can tell me all about that time you saved the burning city of Kharanos.”

The dwarf looked at the stranger like he expected an answer before he turned to the innkeeper and said “Aye that sounds good. It was a very big fire and ah did a lot of work.” Together they walked back to the dwarf’s table.

“Well that takes care of that. I’ll have to remember to leave the innkeeper something for doing such a good job,” the stranger thought to himself. “The commotion with the dwarf seemed to have scared off that gnome at least I don’t have to worry about him bothering me but it looks like the few guards in the place are now looking at me.”

The stranger sighed and continued eating his dinner and by the time he had finished, it looked like the gnome had gone up to his room, the dwarf was several flagons into his story with the innkeeper, and the guards had all left. He grabbed his belongings and stood up when someone approached him from behind and said, “Your room is this way sir.”

“Who are you?” the stranger asked as he turned to face the female voice. He saw a woman standing there watching him. She didn’t seem like much of a threat but the stranger was wary nonetheless for he had traveled to too many different places and had seen too many things to be caught unaware.

“I’m the assistant innkeeper, sir. You can call me Melika” She responded. “Farley told me to see that you were shown to your room when you were done eating. He’d have shown you himself but it looks like he is a little busy with that dwarf.”

“Yes, he does seem to be busy,” the stranger said. “Very well show me to my room, it’s been a long journey and it won’t be over anytime soon for me.”

“Right this way,” Melika said as they went upstairs to the second floor of the inn. She took the stranger to a room at the end of the hallway. They walked past several shut doors until finally they reached the room. “This is your room sir. If you need anything, Farley usually stays up late downstairs so the guards can wander in and grab a quick bite of food during their shifts. Breakfast is served early but if you don’t make it downstairs in time, there is usually fruit and cheeses available as well.”

Melika opened the door to the room and the stranger walked inside and looked around. The room was very sparsely decorated. A bed was against one wall and a few chairs were scattered near a small table. There was a large window on another wall with a view of the main street.

The stranger grunted softly and said, “This will be fine, thank you.”

“Have a good night sir,” Melika said as she closed the door and walked away.

The stranger put the few things he had with him on the table and lay down on the bed to sleep. The rain outside had started lessening which meant that his journey the next morning would be drier than that nights travel. The stranger closed his eyes and quickly went to sleep.

After what seemed like only a few minutes he was woken by a loud crashing noise. He looked around the room and then remembered where he was. It was suddenly bright outside but he was sure he hadn’t slept long. Suddenly he realized that it wasn’t sunlight coming in through the window, it was the light caused by a large fire. He ran to the window and saw that someone had set a nearby house on fire and that the flames had started spreading to the inn.

“With the rain, there was no way that this fire could have been an accident. Someone was trying to burn the town down but could I be the target here?” the stranger asked himself. “Either way I don’t have much time before I’m trapped up here, target or not. I’ve got to get out of here right now!”

He looked out the window one more time and then looked at the door. “But which way do I go: out the window or through the door?”

Those are the two options for the stranger: Go out the window or go out the door through the inn. Please leave a comment with which choice you think the stranger should go with and once again, thanks for reading!

Choose My Adventure!

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 22:49:00 +0000

Ok so I have some free time (read: I am bored as hell at work and want to procrastinate) and I figured that I might as well do something creative since I haven’t done anything truly creative in years. I’ve decided to write a story based in Azeroth and starring the best mage out there: MY mage Jedem. The twist here is that I am going to try out a choose my adventure style for this story. I’ll write something out and at the end of each part, there will be 2-3 options. People can tweet or comment me what they think the choice should be and that’ll be what I write next. I figure this way I’ll get to flex my creative muscles and work with whatever is picked to make an interesting story.

Our story begins as most do: in the midst of a rain storm.

The sentries standing guard outside town silently cursed the rain, they cursed the world for requiring them to stand guard, and more importantly they cursed the Marshal for choosing them over their fellow guards, to stand in rain. They were confident that nothing would try to attack the town because it was so close to Stormwind. Goldshire had weathered many storms worse than the mere rain falling; it had endured through the cataclysmic events caused by Deathwing, the attacks on Northshire Abbey by Orcish hordes, and even the reign of the gnoll Hogger.

Out of the darkness, a lone figure on a horse emerged. The person appeared to be slowly making their way into the town. As soon as the rider was spotted, the guards tensed up and prepared themselves for trouble. When the rider got close enough to one of the guards, he could see that it was a man wearing a heavy coat to ward off the rain. Such a coat could easily hide a weapon or two, so the guard approached the rider carefully.

“Halt!” The guard yelled through the rain. “What business do you have in Goldshire?”

The rider glanced at the guard and let silence answer for him.

“I said what business do you have in Goldshire stranger?” He shouted louder. His fellow sentry moved his hand down to his sword, ready to draw it in defense of the town.

“If you don’t answer me, we will make you answer,” The guard threatened.

“I heard you the first time,” The stranger answered. “Since when do simple travelers deserve to have their well-being threatened? Can not a man ride into this town without an armed escort? Have things gotten that bad in the world, that even Goldshire teems with violence?”

“You have yet to answer my question stranger,” The guard replied. “If your answer satisfies us, we’ll let you go on about your way. If it doesn’t we’ll take you to the Marshal and let him decide what to do with you.”

“Very well, I am heading to Stormwind, or I was until this storm strengthened.” The stranger said. “Now I’m just looking for a warm fire to dry myself off.”

“And what is your business in Stormwind?” The guard asked the rider.

“Now that is none of your concern.” The stranger snapped. “Now either let me pass or take me to your Marshal. I grow weary of answering your questions in this accursed rain.”

The guard stared at the stranger for a few minutes while deciding what to do. Finally he turned to the other sentry and said “Let him pass but make sure he goes into the inn and nowhere else.”

To the stranger he said, “You better make your way to the inn and when I finish my shift later, I’ll be dropping by the inn. I expect to see you there or you can bet that there will be trouble if you’re not.”

“I’m sure I’ll receive as warm a reception there as I did here,” the stranger replied. “But have no fear I have no intention of riding any further in this horrid weather.”

The guard took one last look at the stranger as he slowly riding towards the inn, before walking back to his position. He hoped that the rider would keep his word and not cause any trouble for the town.

After seeing that his horse was stabled, the rider walked into the inn to find that very few people were out in the bad weather. A gnome sat by stairs reading a book, a dwarf was cleaning his rifle on a table alone, and a few off-duty guards were lounging around the common room. As he entered, they all turned to look at him for a few minutes before they went back to whatever conversations they were having. He quickly found the innkeeper and walked towards him.

“I need a room for the night and a drink,” the stranger said.

The innkeeper took a long look at the stranger before replying “Well mister, it seems that the odds are in your favor. We have one room left and from what I can smell, dinner is finally ready to be served. I don’t know you and I don’t trust you so you’ll have to pay for both upfront. If you’re still here in the morning, you can have breakfast on the house. Is that good enough for you?”

“I suppose I don’t really have much of a choice do I?” the stranger answered as he dug a gold coin out of his bags and threw it on the counter. “That should more than cover a night’s stay, dinner, and breakfast. If it doesn’t than you are over charging and we might have to have some harsh words about it. I don’t need nor want your trust; I just want to be left alone.”

The innkeeper picked up the coin and looked it over to make sure it was real before putting it away. “I’ll get you something to eat and drink. Have a seat and it’ll be brought over to you,” The Innkeeper told the stranger. “By the way, do you have a name or should I just make one up for you?”

“My name doesn’t matter. The only thing that does matter is that my money is real and that I want my privacy. Now get me my drink,” the stranger angrily said. He walked toward the common room and picked a table that left his back to the wall. He sat down and casually looked around the room again. The off-duty guards had not moved much and judging from the empty tankards of ale on their table, they would not be going anywhere anytime soon. The dwarf had stopped cleaning his gun and look in his direction. Their eyes met and each gave the other a silent nod. The gnome had stopped reading his book and looked at the stranger with interest. He smiled at the stranger.

The stranger has three choices here: Talk to the Dwarf, talk to the Gnome, or sit and wait for his drink/dinner.

Please leave a comment with the option you want to happen in the comments.

PUG Etiquette

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Wed, 30 May 2012 20:10:00 +0000

As a smallish 10 man casual raiding guild, my guild tends to find itself having to pug a person or two for our raids when we don't have enough people sign up/show up for our raids. Now this doesn't mean that we are a horribad guild that couldn't down hogger or anything. It just means that recruitment has not brought in enough people who can show up to a raid. A normal raid night this expansion will often see us with eight or nine guildees online and ready to raid.

This situation leads us to pug a spot or two so that we can raid on raid nights. Sometimes I have a friend on my friends list that I can ask to come to the raid and when this happens, it's not really pugging as you are pulling in someone you know and not a complete stranger. But sadly there are times when our friends list fails us and we are stuck having to resort to asking for people in trade chat. This is not something that we enjoy doing but sometimes it's either pug or not raid.

This can go in one of three ways: we can get an awesome pug, we can get a horrible pug, or we can get no response at all. Obviously the last option is the worst option, the first option is the best one, and the middle one can go either way. The horrible pug can be horrible due to gear, experience, personality, latency, or even age. Now personality, latency, or age can't be fixed during the time frame of a raid but gear/experience are something that can definitely be worked on in a short amount of time.

Gear is the easiest to solve as it only requires running instances, buying BoE gear from the ah, or crafting gear. Get the gear up to par and you are ready to rock and or roll! We had a guildee who hit 85 and within one week was ready to raid with us. It doesn't take that long that long to get geared and if you are a lucky person with drops/rolls you can get geared even faster.

So you've run a ton of the twilight heroics and are now sporting a nice amount of gear, now what? Time to hit up raids for even better gears! But what if you are afraid of stepping into a real raid? Well I've got a nice list of things to do or not do so that you can be the best pug ever!

1. Don't come in bragging

This is a sure fire way for a pug to piss me off and want to boot them from my raid. A little pride is one thing but full on telling me that your main is clearing this fight or that fight in heroic mode and that this is just an alt which is why they aren't that well geared will earn you a place on my ignore list. The more you keep repeating how awesome your main, the more I will think you're lying and trying to compensate for not being well geared on that character.

2. Ask how fights are done

This doesn't mean that you should NEVER ask a question about a fight. This means that you should do a little research about the raid instance and its fights before trying to get into a real raid. If you have only ever done the fights in LFR, ask what's different between reg and LFR. I have no problem explaining what you should watch out for in reg mode that doesn't happen in LFR. What I have a problem with is someone asking how each and every single boss fight goes. To me this means that the pugged person is more interested in loot then in doing a good job. This is not always the case but more often than not, it is.

3. Don't be a dick

You'd think that this one would be a common sense thing but sadly common sense is rarely common. You are being pugged into a raid of real live human beings who may or may not share similar interests with you. Pissing people off by being a complete d-bag is a sure fire way to find yourself booted from the raid and blacklisted from a lot of raid groups. If you say something offensive that angers people in the raid, you better be prepared to apologize for it. If you're a rather outspoken person who has a tendency to say stupid things, you may need to watch yourself for the run.

4. Do what's asked of you

If you are a dps and you have been assigned to interrupt a boss casted spell, you make sure you interrupt it. If you're a healer and you've been assigned to cleanse a specific debuff off the raid, do so. More often than not, the raid leader knows what is going on and what needs to be done by the raid better than you do. We had a pug healer who was assigned to cleansing a debuff off people and we kept wiping. I took a look at the dispel/cleanse counter and he had a grand total of 0 dispels. His excuse: "I was busy healing and couldn't dispel." We told him to focus on dispelling and to let the other healers heal the raid. We wiped again and I checked the counter again and surprise surprise he had 0 dispels again. Raiding is a team effort and if you can't do your assigned job, you're hurting the team.

5. Remember Silence is Golden

Sometimes we'll pug a person and from the minute they get an invite to the minute we're done with the raid, they will not stop talking. I know some people get nervous when they raid for the first time with a group and when they get nervous they talk a lot but please try and keep it off vent, especially when boss fight strats are being discussed or when loot is being rolled on. I'm not saying that you should never talk in raid chat or over vent, I am just saying that sometimes not talking is nice.
6. Be ready for the invite

If you whisper me for an invite when I'm pugging and after I look at your gear/spec and decide you are just what I'm looking for and send you an invite to the raid please take it. It takes me less than a minute to look someone up and decide if they are getting an invite in. I get that things happen and sometimes people have to afk but if that's the case say something. If you want to come to the raid, making 9 people sit around and wait for you to accept an invite is not a smart idea. If I have several whispers from qualified people and the first person doesn't take their invite and hasn't said anything, the next person will get the invite. I usually give someone 2 invites and if they don't take either of them, I move on.

7. Be geared for content

One of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to pugging someone for a raid is when they are obviously not geared enough for whatever raid I'm looking to run. More specifically when they are wearing a full PvP gear set and have no PvE gear. My eye starts twitching and my head begins to hurt whenever I run across these people and sadly it happens often. I will get a whisper from someone who claims that they can do 30k dps and have an ilvl of 390. I look them up and see that they are wearing full PvP gear including weapons, rings, and trinkets and have a total hit percent of 2%. There is no way on Azeroth that this person can do 30k dps on a raid boss (unless they are a druid and even then it's iffy. (Damn druids and their lack of needing hit!)) PvP gear =/= ready to raid PvE. Similarly if you are wearing greens, quest blues, or worse and you whisper me to get an invite to the raid, prepare to be told no.

Yes we can carry a dps or two but will we? No, unless it's a guildee and even then probably not.

8. Don't be a dick

I know I already mentioned this one before but I really want to make sure people understand how important this one is.

9. Try to learn something

Sometimes you end up in a great pug and learn all sorts of cool strategies on how to do certain bosses and sometimes you end up in a horrible pug that can't get past the first boss. When you get the second group, you will learn many things too, like how NOT to pull a boss or where NOT to stand during the fight. Sometimes you learn that a group of people are completely incompatible with you when it comes to raiding and that is very important because you know for next time to not join the same group when they are pugging a run. If you're on an alt, you can learn how different classes see the fight. I know that when I'm tanking the fight I'm only paying attention to my health, my cds, and whether there is fire under my feet but as a healer I'm watching where people are standing, where I'm standing, how much mana I have, and what boss abilities are about to come off cooldown so that I can toss the appropriate heals out.

10. Be willing to have a good time

Our raids are run the way the guild is run: with the intent to have fun and to enjoy ourselves. We laugh and make jokes most of the time and more importantly we down bosses while doing so. If you are a super serious raider type person, you need to loosen up and remember that it is just a game after all. Some people tend to forget this and they cause themselves unnecessary stress because of it.

So if you follow these few tips, you will totes be the next pug superstar. Or you'll fail miserably because I'm a baddy and I give bad advice. Probably the latter but it's up to you to decide!

For the Bloggers

noreply@blogger.com (Jed) — Fri, 18 May 2012 16:52:00 +0000

Today I think I will talk about blogging. So if you only read my blog (and let’s face it...no one reads my blog) for only WoW stuff you may want to amuse yourself in other ways which I may or may not want to know about. Hmm dirty humor in the second sentence of a post...right on schedule. I think this will be the first in a series of helpful blogging tips so enjoy the first post and eventually I’ll get around to posting more.

So how do you rise to levels of blog fame where people flock to your blog posts in the thousands and hang on your every word? Well the first step is the easiest: start a blog! Once you have a blog you need to do three things: Find a subject to write about, write something, and get your name out there.

Finding a theme

Starting a blog will be the easiest thing that you can do. What do I write about you may be asking yourself. Well ideally you should be writing about something that you enjoy. If you like raiding than write about raiding; if you enjoy playing the auction house, than do an auction house based blog. If you have several interests than do what I did and just write on whatever subject you feel like. As long as they are tied together in some way you will be fine. If you are writing a WoW blog, than make sure most of your topics are WoW related. Yes, you can definitely write non WoW topics on your blog should you feel like it. If your writing is interesting and appealing enough to your readers, they will keep coming back to read whatever it is that you post.

You can always change your mind later about what you are writing about so don’t feel like you are locked into only writing about one specific topic. You may not want to limit your blogging to something super specific like Draenei Paladin journeys because in a few months you may decide that you want to write about your adventures as an Orc hunter or a Panda monk.

Write something

You’ve decided on a theme and are ready to get a post out there. What do you write about? Write about what you know. Write about what you see around you. Write anything. I often have a hard time with this one myself. I tend to have more ideas about what I want to write about than I do actual posts. Some people plan out their blog posts ahead of time and some write on the spur of the moment about something that caught their attention. You can write a guide or tell a story about something funny that happened to you in game. You can

Do your best while writing posts to maintain good grammar, spelling, and punctuation. I know for some bloggers, English is not their first language and it is more work for them to post in English but most of the really good ones do the extra work and make sure that their posts are legible and readable. If English IS your first language and you have horrible grammar/spelling/etc. than I would suggest you do what I do: write out a post and then copy and paste it into Microsoft Word and run the spell check tool. It will catch most of your spelling and grammar mistakes. You can also have someone else read your post and tell you if they catch anything that you or your spell check missed. Having someone else proof read your post will also allow you to learn if your blog post flows well. If you write something and you are jumping all over the place topic wise but you don’t notice, an extra set of eyes can point that you so you can pull it all together.

Remember that your blog is YOURS. If you read something that you disagree with, write a post about why you disagree with whatever it is. Don't be afraid to step away from the group and think on your own. Sometimes disagreeing with the majority can be the only way to bring about change and sometimes it's the start of a huge firestorm. If you are writing something that you know will cause a commotion, make sure that whatever you write is clear, concise, and to the point. There are people out there in this world who think that their opinion is the only valid one out there and they may decide that your post was written solely to offend them. This can happen and honestly these people want to pick a fight regardless of whether you want one or not. If what you write makes some people angry, keep an eye on comments and lock down the post if you feel that it's getting out of hand.

Socialize

Okay so you've decided on a theme for your blog and you've written your first post, well now what? Now you get to work on getting your blog out there into the blogisphere where other people who aren't connected to you someway can read what you wrote. There are plenty of ways to publicize your blog. I recommend you do one or all of the following things: register on Blog Azeroth, get listed on the Twisted Nether Wiki, and join Twitter.

The Blog Azeroth forums are a great way to put your blog out there and meet people. The people there are super nice and are always willing to help new bloggers get started. If you like they can take a look at your blog theme or content and give you advice on things you may want to work on. This advice is very handy and is always done in a helpful tone so you never feel like you are being attacked. I posted my blog there when I first started blogging and got a lot of great tips on how to make my blog look cool.

Listing your blog on the Twisted Nether Wiki gives you another way for people to come across your blog. You can also look through their categories to see if there are other people blogging about similar things to you which is helpful because you can possibly get ideas for posts.

And finally join Twitter. Twitter is a melting pot of so many talented and amazing people and even if you don't have a blog you should still join Twitter just to meet these people. Twitter is a great way to get your blog name out there. When you join start following people who seem interesting and don't be afraid to join conversations people are having, unless it's an obviously personal conversation or something. I joined Twitter and for a while I was deathly afraid of tweeting anything or anyone because I was scared that they would think I was dumb. Eventually you realize that you have to jump into it and not worry so much about things like that.

I've met many cool people on Twitter and have had a blast on it. Whenever I write a blog post I'll tweet a link and if people like what I wrote they'll retweet it which sends the link out to their followers and gives your post a wider audience. More people reading your post is always a good thing.

Now I'm not saying that if you follow these three tips you will be the greatest blogger that ever was. What I am saying is that blogging takes a lot of work and it can be very rewarding. If you are interested in blogging, these three tips may help you. Blogging is fun and hopefully if you are reading this you'll enjoy this post and become inspired to start a blog. With my luck it'll be a "Jed is the worst" blog...which would be awesome.