This Is Your Brain on WoW

Feral Tanking in 4.0.3 and Me

2010-12-03T10:18:00.000-08:00

Before 4.0 Ive always had an idea on how to tank from past experiences in BC. In BC, at max level I was a resto druid that respecced every once in a while to feral to farm mats and stuff. It’s funny because at the time I had no idea how to dps as a kitty but I knew how to hold single target aggro in bear form. I never tanked any 5 mans but I remember tanking some of the high level elites for dailies and high level quest chains.

In Wrath when I first decided to officially make my secondary spec feral, I put in a lot of time researching how to play correctly and perform the best I could with my toon. I soon became a pretty decent feral dps after spending much time on the target dummy and I also messed around a little with tanking some lower level instances for guildies. When 4.0 launched and the new talent trees were implemented, I found it easier to pick a few of the tanking talents while speccing for feral dps primarily. Even though I had a few damage reduction talents for bear form I was still a little hesitant to queue as a tank in the dungeon finder mainly because I wasn't sure about how to handle tanking different situations. I realize now that this was silly because I already knew that I knew how to handle different tanking situations by just knowing the feral spec and how to apply that knowledge to different encounters. Mainly it came down to me being afraid of accountability. What I mean by that is I didn't want to use the excuse that I was tanking with kitty gear in a kitty spec when something went wrong while I was tanking. If anything I wanted to be recognized as a skilled kitty druid with the capacity to tank effectively if needed. So for a while I decided to play it safe and just dps.

My first opportunity to officially tank for a group actually came a while before 4.0 was implemented. It happened while I was in H ToC and the tank mysteriously dc’d after dying to the first boss/s. I knew that I had pretty decent gear for my toon and the heals for the group was pretty decent as well. I decided to go ahead and offer to tank as long as the healer didn't object and to my surprise they could have cared less. Long story short I was a beast of a tank and we 4-manned the instance. I learned that I would have no trouble keeping aggro while tanking with full dps gear. Ever since then I could not help but want to offer to tank when ever the opportunity presented itself. But I still did not queue for the roll in randoms...until 4.0 of course.

It may seem a little pointless to some that I just started doing this not long before Cata actually launches (because I definitely wont’ be to while leveling to 85 or anytime after that....and hopefully no time after that if they scale gear with bosses like they say they plan to) but its a personal feat for me to be able to queue for all roles in the dungeon finder and perform them all pretty well.

I’ve even been able to answer the request of many players wanting insta-queue w/tanks for randoms in trade. And in doing so I've also made some decent money from those offering to pay :).

My spec:

I don't have a tanking set so I use the same gear set that I use for feral and you can view that here. I found that I don’t take a whole lot of damage and most of the time the damage I do take is the result of Berserking proccing. I also use the same prime glyphs, which are Glyph of Rip, Glyph of Shred, and Glyph of Savage Roar as there really is no need to change them. For Major glyphs, right now I only have Glyph of Maul which helps a little with tanking multiple targets.

Single target:
My strategy for single target tanking is simple. I normally pull with Feral Faerie Fire or I might just Feral Charge in. I then apply my stacks of Lacerate, Mangle when off cd or on a Clearcast proc, and Maul to get rid of some rage. I generate plenty of threat even when arcane mages unload...and you know how OP they are right now.
Multiple target:
This is a little bit more tricky since Swipe has a 6 sec. cd now. I start the pull normally by either using Feral Charge or Feral Faerie Fire on a single target then opening up with Lacerate. I then tab between targets and apply a Lacerate or Mangle and I keep sure to Swipe when ever its off its cd. For good measure I also throw in a few Mauls to generate more threat across more than one target. When ever things get out of hand I’ll throw up a Challenging Roar or use Growl to keep mobs off the healer...almost 100% of the time due to dps AoE’ing. I let dps fend for themselves....hehe (they have to learn sometime and with Cata around the corner now is as good a time as any).

I wouldnt call this the definite method for tanking but it is the accumulation of all my knowledge of druid tanking as it is. Also keep in mind that this is from the perspective of a kitty tanking with a primarily kitty dps spec and kitty dps gear.

With tanking I’ve grown accustom to tab targeting...or rather I find I’m doing it way more often than normal. For instance, when dps’ing trash I find myself tab targeting and applying Rake and Swiping on CC procs. I love implementing this strategy on my Boomkin as well by applying Moonfire and Insect Swarm on multiple targets to get multiple dots ticking. This is definitely a welcome alternative to using Hurricane and Starfall on every trash pull. And thats feral tanking and me

Cataclysm Professions: A Whole New Grind

2010-11-30T09:18:00.000-08:00

With Cataclysm fast approaching there are many things to look forward to and be excited about. I realized a few days ago that one of the things I am personally looking forward to is going into this expansion with 3 max level toons from the previous expansion. With three level 80’s I will be able to enjoy three different leveling and gaming experiences. Another plus is that I can start off leveling 6 different professions at the start of an expansion to capitalize on whatever profits there are to be gained!

My main character remained an alchemist/herbalist throughout BC and Wrath and will continue to practice alchemy and herbalism in Cata. I’ve always wanted to have several toons with different professions to become a little more self sufficient but I’ve never been up for leveling more toons to max level until recently. Towards the end of Wrath I leveled another druid as an enchanter/inscriptionist and a death knight as a jewelcrafter/miner. I believe all of their professions are maxed out as of now except for maybe my enchanting. I don’t know if its nerdy of me but I’m really extra ecstatic about leveling these toons the more I think about it. I definitely plan on posting some sort of leveling guide for each of the professions eventually but for now I’d like to share why I look forward to leveling these professions starting with alchemy.

Alchemy:
First off, alchemists are getting their own craftable mount with Vial of the Sands! The Vial of the Sands mount will transform the player into a sandstone drake which will allow the alchemist to carry an ally on their back. Best mount ever! (take that magic carpet...jk lol). We will also get a new epic version of the alchemist stone in the Lifebound Alchemist Stone. Here are some of the consumables and transmutes that alchemists will get as well.

Flasks:

Potions:

Transmutes:

Enchanting:
Come Cataclysm enchanters will be able to craft a new companion. The Enchanted Lantern will be for Horde and the Magic Lamp will be for Alliance. Both seem to be relatively easy to make and should be craftable fairly soon after enchanting is maxed as I’m pretty sure all the mats will have been farmed by then from simply leveling the profession. If you haven't all ready go and take a look at the new particle effects for the weapon enchants because they are spectacular. You can view them here. And without further ado here are the enchants that will be available in Cata.

Weapon enchants:

Armor enchants:

Ring enchants:

Inscription:
Inscription seems to be the same this time around with the exception of a couple of new interesting items and a few random craftable items that seem to serve no purpose other than to amuse. There will be new glyphs, inks, and scrolls as well as off-hand items. There will of course also be the shoulder enchants that are better than the shoulder enchants which are faction rewarded and an epic caster relic.

Jewelcrafting:
What can I say...I’m really happy to have a JC at the start of an expansion. Hopefully jewelcrafting/mining will continue to be every bit of the cash cow as it has been in previous expansions. Cheers to me!

Short Hiatus

2010-11-18T10:59:00.000-08:00

Sorry for not having very many posts these past couple of weeks but I have been very busy with other things. I’ve started a few with various topics that I wouldn’t mind discussing but I haven't been able to complete any...I don't know...writer’s block or something. Believe it or not I also haven't had much time to play WoW as much as I would like to even with Cataclysm fast approaching *Gasps*. Truth is there are definitely some things I need to get in order before I can play WoW as much as I’d like...especially before Cataclysm. I’ve been feeling a tad unproductive as of late (or maybe the monotony that has been developing in my life finally drove me to be more proactive) and I’ve decided to put a few of my joys on the back burner (mainly gaming) until I get some things rolling. I mean waiting on responses from jobs/colleges and test scores is way better than just sitting and putting these things off. Not that I have been sitting and not doing anything, I just haven't been as proactive....consecutively, as I could have been. I’ve only been playing a little (like probably less than 10hrs a week...that's including raiding) but I have experienced some of the pre-Cataclysm events so maybe I’ll be able to fit in a post about that soon. Guess I just wanted it to be known that I don’t plan on letting my creative outlet for WoW drop of the face of the interwebz and that I’ll be back full force asap.

*Side note: For whatever reason sometime last week I thought it would be very cool to do like a comic strip of my WoW experiences. Whats funny is that I have very little experience drawing or being artistic (besides the few times I had to in like elementary) but I think I’d like to give a crack at doing this anyway. Just what I need right?. Something else to pile on to the list of things I need to do...and this is only a list of things related to WoW so I’m not even considering real life stuff. That doesn't stop me from being excited about it though so expect a debut of my drawerings at some point as well. It won’t be ongoing but Ill do it just enough to be pleasantly expected/unexpected from time to time.

From Facerolling to /facepalm'n

2010-10-28T14:15:00.000-07:00

It’s no mystery that raids and dungeons have become less and less of a challenge as our gear got better. A group can easily ignore the mechanics of a fight as long as their group meets the following criteria

They have uber dps and uber heals
They have an uber tank and uber heals
They have an uber group with uber dps,tank and heals

You can have only uber dps or only uber heals depending on the encounter/situation but I’m not quite sure having only an uber tank will cut it. I mean having a great tank will of course still make most things easy but at the cost of the run being painstakingly long and unbearable. Also uberness doesn't compensate for stupidity...that’s a hidden 4th rule...or first depending on how you look at it. However, on some rare occasions when the stars align, being able to face-roll through a raid or dungeon can make up for a player’s lack of ability or mental capacity ( I don't have any specific statistics but at least in my own experiences if I had to throw a number out there I’d say about .99% of all cases...meaning you’d have a better chance getting a Green-Proto Drake or White Polar Bear then successfully carrying someone incompetent..at least through a raid).

Don’t get me wrong though, being able to speed through everything can be very advantageous especially to the casual player. It leaves you more time to do other things to enjoy the game and also allows you to experience more content faster. At the same time I believe it’s crippling a lot of players because many of them will experience a rude awakening come Cataclysm. I can foresee healers being hit the hardest by having to deal with all of the players who won’t be used to doing other things besides “wailing away” at the boss. I agree with recent posts from RestoDude and Shy that players will have to learn to play smarter and not rely on uber heals to carry them through everything. It most likely will be a little frustrating the first few months (especially in PuG’s) until people are familiar with the mechanics of things and get better gear. But that’s no excuse to become complacent because Blizzard seems to have intentions to prevent content from being easy mode as we get better gear by making bosses scale with gear. I’m not sure to what extent or exactly how much this will affect anything but hopefully it will keep all the content interesting until the end and players on their toes. I intended to make this post dedicated to healers but something went wrong at some point and my brain/train of thought frazzled so I guess more on that and dps’ing later :).

Healing Impressions

2010-10-25T10:42:00.000-07:00

I know a lot of resto druids were (and still are) a little peeved about the changes to the Tree of Life form. I for one can admit that I was amongst the group of fairly disgruntled tree healz pissed off at blizz for taking away our beloved form when it was first announced. I’m actually still not very partial to the idea that I’m a druid but the manner in which I go about healing kinda goes against one of the facets of being a druid. I mean don't get me wrong, druid healers still have hots but priests have hots as well. One of the things that made druids cool to play was the fact that we shape-shifted into a form to take on a particular role. Kinda like superheroes. Yes the primary reason superheroes wore their costumes was to keep their real identity secret but if you disregard that then the main reason was to individualize each hero/heroine. I guess the argument can be made that even if superheroes didn’t need to worry about their identity or being confused with another superhero, they still had their own powers...(of course there were some superheroes that had the same powers as others but...yea). Which in that case would make this a bad comparison but I’m sure you guys pretty much get the just of what I’m trying to say. Being a druid meant becoming so attuned to nature that you possessed the ability to harness said power and take on a form to fulfill a role. That’s what was so cool about the druid class. While it is technically a hybrid class you still have the option to specialize and be effective at any role which most players tend to do. When I dps as my feral kitty I’m glad to be in kitty form. If I wanted to see my gear or do something else besides dps in my kitty form, I would have rolled a rouge or pally or something. Players don’t spec as healers to do dps and I’ve only had the unfortunate pleasure of witnessing maybe one or two players that spammed wrath instead of healing while specced restoration...before 4.0. Needless to say I don't know what was wrong with those guys but to each his own. Now resto druids lost their permanent shape-shift to have the ability to throw out some dps from time to time. There’s even synergy in the resto talent tree for it. Hopefully cataclysm will provide reason enough for healers to be doing dps when there should be capable dps doing their job already.

I digress.

My reason for posting isn't to qq about the changes to tree of life as I’ve known about the changes for some time now so its kind of irrelevant how I feel about them. I wanted to give my impressions of resto healing as of 4.0. I’ve only gotten the opportunity to heal in a raid once (only for a few trash packs) since the patch but I have healed multiple 5-mans. I have to say that I really like most of the spell changes and I cant wait to actually use them in a Cataclysm raid situation. There is definitely a lot more to healing now then spamming rejuvenation on everyone and wild growth when it’s on cool down. I don't know about everyone else’s server but on my server trees were coming out the woodwork towards the end when the fall of the lich king patch went live because of how easy tree healing was. It took very little skill to top hps meters or be in the top. Because of this I was mostly less then thrilled to have to heal anything especially with two or more trees randomly tossing rejuve on everyone. With the new patch mana isn't really much of an issue but cast times are. So while you can spam whatever you want, if you don't use the the right heal your target can potentially die before you are able to react. I like how the need to become efficient at healing has already been implemented so we don’t have to get used to the changes in Cata. Besides the whole “lack of tree form” thing I really look forward to

Second Glance...wtf!

2010-10-14T12:57:00.000-07:00

When 4.0 first went live and I was able to test out my dps unbuffed on a target dummy, I was pleased to find that overall it wasn't as abysmal as many others claimed it would be. Albeit this was on a target dummy and there were a number of other factors that were not taken into consideration, I assumed that I could factor my results on the dummy into other situations (like any player normally would) and be able to conclude upon my plausible dps performance in 5 man and raid settings. This however was not the case. I mean before 4.0 target dummies were basically for practicing rotations which lead to trying to optimize one’s dps. So how could I be faulted to assume that as a result of playing with other players who brought more buffs (and debuffs in some cases) my dps would definitely increase considerably like it did before 4.0.

Boy was I wrong.

I don't know if its because a lot of the buffs have been consolidated so that there are really only a couple of buffs that would be useful for any one player’s role, or if feral dps really does suck at the moment (as well as other melee classes), but for whatever reason when I got into a 25 VoA yesterday my dps barely increased by 1k. I mean there was every possible class/spec present in the raid (even the ever reclusive enhancement shammy which are pretty scarce on my server) so I can assume that I had most if not every player buff possible to have in game.

Call it qq’ing if you will but for other classes (locks and mages) to do ridiculous dps quite effortlessly in equal or less awesome gear and for me to barely do half of that does seem a bit ridiculous. I’m not one to get on forums and complain but I’m guessing that many players did because blizz announced that they would be doing more balancing to dps classes. I'm not sure if it will go into affect on live or if they were referring to the beta (I’m pretty sure they were talking about on live though) but hopefully it will be a welcome change. Everyone knows that the patch was not really intended for level 80 characters in that a lot of the game mechanics that were introduced in the patch were meant to be balanced around a toon at level 85. This I know...I mean really... but you still have to take into consideration that we still have to pay for a subscription for the next few months until Cataclysm and who wants to pay to do something they aren't getting enjoyment out of. And that's what dps’ers do. When we select that role we don't spend time tightening up our rotations and getting better gear with hopes of increasing our performance to end up doing crap dps. DKS has an interesting post on dps (trash dps to be specific but its still interesting) with a few points that I agree with and I’m pretty sure every other dps will as well. Yes we know that a good dps also has raid awareness and knows when to be on the right target at the right time but ultimately that's all stuff that’s for the good of the raid. It guarantees the raids success and makes the game more interesting. But at the end of the day any toon with the role of dps will wonder if they topped the charts are not or at least if they were in top 5/10. I don’t want to be OP or anything but I don’t want to be gimped either.

Fortunately, the changes to healing specs are nice because they just change up the way we heal to get decent output. I’ll probably get into that more when I actually get around to healing something lol.

4.0 First Impressions!

2010-10-13T13:48:00.000-07:00

I don't know about anyone else but it took me forever to get the last part of the patch finished (or enough data streamed to be able to play). Of course I knew this would happen so I was content with mindlessly trying to occupy my attention with other things while anxiously awaiting the patch’s completion. I was able to hop on all of my toons eventually and take the new specs for a semi test drive but unfortunately due to how late the patch actually finished for me I was not able to spend a lot of time with them... and I probably won’t be able to do anything until later today.

I logged in on my main first to check out first hand some of the changes to resto and feral.

Because of my time constraints I did not look into re-gemming or re-forging ( lol, I Iogged off not being completely sure if that was even available. I just assumed it was since it was among the things to find in Shattrath when I spoke with a guard). I did manage to get the appropriate prime glyphs for all of my toons. I honestly didn't spend to much time in my restoration spec. I did notice I had a crap ton more hp and mana but my heals weren't hitting as hard as they used to even out of caster form let alone while in tree. Also my mana barely moved but then again I was just messing around with the spells so I really wasn't using anything that you might say would be optimal to use in an appropriate situation. Even still, I noticed with the cast time of the direct healing spells by the time I cast the next spell my mana was regenerating crazy fast. I also popped the ‘tree form’ cool down to check it out. I guess it was cool and all but I would rather just have tree form back as a permanent shapeshift. A lot of people have qq’d about the tree form skin as wit was before 4.0 and blizz has actually addressed that “problem” in a recent build

.

I assume the four different colors are for each of the four races that have a druid class...at least that’s what I would assume. Either way they most likely won’t be available until Cataclysm actually ships. Today I plan on healing at least one random to see how my resto experience will really be changed.

After messing with resto for a bit I was really not to to eager to test out kitty dps so I hopped on my alts first. I’ll talk about my dk first since he was unfortunately the most lackluster.

As some may or may not know, Blizz decided to make blood the new dedicated tank tree of dk’s and frost the dedicated dps tree. Like all the other classes there’s not a whole lot anyone can do to deviate from a cook cutter spec due to the reduction of talent points available at the level cap. Being that 80 isn't the level cap intended for the new talent trees everyone is definitely forced into basically picking up everything that is necessary with only a spare 2 or 4 points depending on play style. With that said (and also mentioning that I am far from a dk expert) I'm not disappointed with the frost tree as it pertains to me doing dps. I'm also not doing very much dps... I guess about the same I was doing in 3.3.5. I am insanely over the hit cap though for my dk but as I stated earlier I didn't really bother with re-gemming or re-forging yet.

I probably had the most fun on my balance druid. After getting proper prime glyphs I found that my dps had more than doubled than what I was doing before...and Mizzle is still practically a new 80. Its kind of a shame that he is doing almost as much dps now as Bigbody (my main) who far outgears him. I love the new eclipse mechanic and starsurge. I cant wait to get into a random later today. Heres a snippet of my work on a target dummy.

After playing with Mizzle for a while I then got up the nerve to hop on Bigbody and see what all the talk has been about concerning feral kitty. I’m definitely not the best feral kitty in WoW and not even the best on my server (although with there not being so many of us I consider myself to rank at least top...5 or 10. At least that I know of). That's mainly due to my gear because I reached the point where it was ridiculously hard to get upgrades due to my raiding availability so I found my self getting what I could get and re-gemming and enchanting to optimize my stats. Even still I liked my stat build and I managed to put out decent dps that was obviously inherent of some skill on my part.

So after picking up my necessary prime glyphs I proceeded to the dummy to see if feral dps really went down the tubes. Surprisingly I found that my dps did not suffer a substantial decrease. I cant express how relieved I was. I was so close to expressing how relieved I was in trade but I opted not too due to all the qq that was already going on. The damage that each of my abilities was putting out was definitely different but I did not find a need to change up my rotation by much. As it stands now there is definitely more of a urgency to keep you bleeds up at all times and having savage roar up isn't as big of a deal. Now this is obviously my experience at level 80 with level 80 gear so things most likely will change once we move into cata. My dps is probably where it is now because of the insane amount of crit I have and because of the haste that was added with the conversion from armor penetration.

All in all I'm satisfied and glad that my position as viable dps still remains for the most part. I cant wait to get in a random or a raid for that matter on this guy is all I have to say.

Head first into 4.0.......point 1

2010-10-11T15:59:00.000-07:00

So 4.0.1 is almost upon us... unless of course the patch is delayed for some reason. Everyone will have quite a bit of adjusting to do once we are finally able to log in. The first thing I’m pretty sure I will do in game is redo my talent specs and then re optimize my gear. I will also most likely end up disabling all of my addons just in so my interface doesn't explode. I’ve wanted to do a post on my proposed druid specs and maybe death knight spec just to share how I will approach 4.0.1. I think I will talk a little bit about feral for the time being as I have been raiding as feral dps a lot more often then healing as of late (sadly that may reverse in the future..only time will tell). Because of that I guess I feel I have a little more insight on whats going to be changing with the spec than resto at the moment. I will post my experience with balance and resto after the patch goes live.

Feral Talent spec:

At level 80 we will have only 36 points, and 31 of those have to be spent in the Feral tree before we can put any points in the Restoration tree. This makes the Tier 2 talents in the Resto tree unreachable until Cataclysm is released.

Level 80 Kitty raid spec here

In my opinion, these are the necessary talents dps wise for a kitty build. I skipped Predatory Strikes because I don't envision myself using ravage too much before cataclysm comes out and I don't mind missing out on the chance to proc a free nature spell. I also skipped over Primal Madness because while you are dpsing there should not be a time where you need your energy capped really. That's debatable I guess. That leaves 2 points left over for a level 80 kitty to spend. In all honesty it does not really matter where you put these points as I don’t believe any of the other talents will have a significant influence on your dps at 80.

There isn't much reason to put the remaining two points into Natural Shapeshifter because you wont be be able to get to Master Shapeshifter at level 80. That leaves us with spending the remaining two points somewhere in the feral tree.

Supposedly feral will be lacking in regards to the damage we will be doing once 4.0.1 goes live. The remaining talents can arguably provide a little utility in a PVE environment depending upon the situation. I personally never specced for any of these talents once I specced feral dps in Wotlk and I only have a little experience with some from BC and most are only good for farming and leveling.

Infected Wounds: this talent puts a stacking debuff on the target and affects their movement speed and melee speed. There are other classes with similar debuffs and there will most likely be one in your raid. I don't know about other servers but the raids on my server always tend to be melee heavy. This can also be good for soloing and grinding physical damage dealing mobs.

Thick Hide: This talent mainly affects your bear form and can be good for soloing and grinding but wont provide much utility in a raid. One thing that would be beneficial is the reduced chance to be critically hit by melee attacks but I’m not entirely sure if that applies to kitty form as well.

Nurturing Instinct: increases the amount you are healed by 10% and increases your healing spells by 35% of your agility. A nice talent to have for soloing/grinding and makes you easy to heal in raids.

Survival Instincts: reduced damage by 12% in bear or kitty form. Meh. As far as dps goes I'm not even sure kitties will have a problem with aggro at 80. But would be a fun talent to have for soloing instances though.

Natural Reaction: another talent that will make soloing in bear more doable as kitty spec. Otherwise no PVE utility at all for cats.

Pulverize: Just a new ability for bear.

Instead of taking Primal Madness off the bat I decided to put two in Thick Hide so I will probably go with Nurturing Instinct or Primal Madness or a combo of the two so I wont go crazy if i get thrown away as a valuable melee dps and can at least farm instances or something.

As far as glyphs go they seem pretty in order. Kalon over at the ThinkTank blog has some pretty good information on how to optimize gems and stats (if reforging is available) and much more.

Although I won’t talking much about the resto changes, here's a glimpse of the proposed resto spec I may be rolling with. Unlike feral, there are a lot of options to choose from when it comes to restoration talents and even less of these options seem useless imho. I'm really looking forward to that and to the challenge of healing in ICC! The balance tree is awesome in my opinion as far as PVE utility goes. Even the not so necessary points are fun and interesting to have. Here’s a glimpse of the balance spec or something close to it that I will be using. A lot more on balance and resto in posts to come!

BA Shared Topic: Whats In A Name?

2010-10-08T12:46:00.000-07:00

With all the anticipation and preparation for patch 4.0.1, I've been negligent of my blog for a couple of days mainly because I've been trying to farm useful in game pics to use in upcoming posts. Well I guess I haven't really been negligent because I had intentions of improving my content for readers. Anyways, I still want to talk about some patch related stuff but I guess now I need to debate if it would be worthwhile since the patch is so close. I'll worry about that later though. In the meantime I'd like to participate in this week's Blog Azeroth Shared Topic from Llani of Pocket Heals!

First I'd like to say that this is a very good topic so props to Llani :). For me, when it comes to creating names for my toons I always try to be random with hopes of coming up with something unique and witty.   I mean who doesn't want a cool name that people comment on all the time in trade. Then after some time passes and I realize that my creativity isn't quite up to the task I end up either meshing together phrases or words people normally use that I find funny or just using random phrases that no one would think to use for a name. Basically there is no logic involved which I like because I like to think of my naming system as my very own random name generator without the role-play element and weird syllables and silent letters. I'll go into further detail about the thought process (or proposed thought process of all the names that seem like they were literally made on a whim) of my toons beginning with my alts.

Mizzleman: I came up with Mizzleman mainly because a lot of my other real life user names are renditions of a nickname I had in high school and I figured I'd make another. The nickname I'm referring to is Mike B.   I got the name my freshmen year of high school from my section leader in band. I'm not entirely sure why but it kind of stuck. It really literally followed me throughout my high school career. I don't have a 'B' anywhere in my name and people tend to ask where it came from a lot but I just tell them that it doesn’t matter because I liked it and it sounds cool lol.

Krownroyale: Krownroyale is the name of my death knight and doesn't really have much story to it. I just wanted to try and come up with a unique dk name since a lot of people created generic dk names when Wrath first launched and there were not many clever ones on my server. There were a few though. Anyways Krownroyale remains pretty unique today at least according to wowarmory.com on the US servers (as well as Mizzleman, check it out for yourself) which is surprisingly shocking to me.

Knowomsayin: This is an example of one of those instances where I just meshed together a phrase. I guess this name actually does have a bit of a background now that I think about it. During my college career when I was first exposed to facebook, mypace, and twitter, I started creating shortened versions of phrases due to the way I talked and my accent. Whenever I posted something or texted someone I always thought about how what I was saying would actually sound if I said it. Because of that my social media dialogue and my texts evolved into something entirely different from the way I actually write. This is cool because it all fit in the new "slang" that developed because of social networking sites. It's also unique in a way even today because all of my friends at one point or another can always hear me saying something depending on what I write. Anyways, one of the phrases that I shortened was "Do you know what I'm talking about" which I wrote as "Knowomtombot" which was how it sounded as I said it sometimes. I believe I do have a toon named Knowomtombot on another server but I don't count him because I hardly play him. I do intend on recycling the name for a new toon though in cata. Errm back to the original subject. So Knowomtombot came from "Do you know what I'm talking about" and respectively Knowomsayin comes from "Do you know what I am saying?"

Schwagganator: I absolutely have no idea where this came from. It’s just another result of my very own random name generator. Awesomeness! It's also pretty unique at the moment as well.

Bluburykush:   Some will find this funny and some or most likely many probably won’t. But at least let me explain some things first. I’ve already said that I sometimes like to mesh phrases that are funny together for names. Well I kind of got this idea from seeing some of the names of the toons on my server. I found out through the course of playing all these years that a vast majority of the players on my server are avid… Well I’m not exactly sure how to say this but let’s just say a lot of the players like to partake in “elevating the masses” or “cooking with potbelly Joe” (I had to Google common phrases and I found this . A lot of the references are really entertaining). Anyways a lot of players have names that tend to reference to one of their “hobbies” and they’re mostly just simple phrases that look weird at first but when you recognized each individual word they can be pretty funny. When I created my first dranei toon it happened to be after a memorable 25man ToC raid where every so often someone would blame their sub par performance on the fact that they were “under the influence” and other raid members would make relevant comments. Needless to say we wiped quite a few times but we did complete the instance and the only reason I stayed and actually enjoyed myself was because of how social the raid was. It was interesting banter to say the least. So sometime after this when I created the toon I didn’t have anything in mind so I thought because of the blue skin I would just randomly make a reference to you know what. He’s still a fairly low level toon because I’m waiting for cata to level him.

Sukisukinow: Sukisukinow is my only bank toon and my only female toon. She’s level 1 so I doubt anyone will ever get to see here unless for some reason I decide to level a warrior.   Another result of my random name generator really.

Bigbody: Bigbody is the first character I actually leveled from 1 to 70 through BC and then to 80. Back then when I had to come up with a name I really had no idea what to choose and it’s kind of hard to try and remember my thought process from back then. I do know that I got the name from a reference to a car from a particular song. Ahh now it comes back to me. So since I pretty much started playing WoW while I was in college, it’s not too surprising that the inspiration for my first toon’s name comes from a college experience. I remember freshmen year hanging out with a group of my friends in someone’s dorm. That one particular night we were talking about our respective high schools and somehow got on the subject of music preferences and what songs we all knew. One particular song that half of us knew and the other half didn’t resonates that night because we spent part of the night trying to teach our friends that song. The name of the song was “Knockin Pictures Off The Wall” and one part of had “bigbody” in it because it was referring to a wide bodied or wide framed cars and or trucks and SUV’s. I remember explaining that and a lot of other things but for whatever reason that line of the song always stuck in my head. When I made my first toon I figured that would be as good as any. Coincidentally later on I found that Bigbody would be fitting for a druid tank according to some of the people I’ve played with but I don’t intend on having Bigbody tank since I have another toon for that.

These are basically descriptions of the origins of all my toons and as you’ve noticed they are in no way related to the class or race so I figure I will label all the names with the colors that identify the different classes in game.

Down Time

2010-10-05T09:41:00.000-07:00

By this point a lot of people have already seen most of the endgame content of the expansion and are biding time until cataclysm comes out. I find myself in a similar situation as I have cleared ICC 10 and most of ICC 25 man on my main.

I'm more of a casual player than hardcore so I have gotten to see most of the content by filling spots in people's regular 10 or 25 man groups mainly because I can do that at my leisure (also because of my mad skills that people tend to recognize... jk ).

I often find myself doing this because the guild runs that are scheduled tend to deviate from the times I'm actually available. This doesn't really bother me much because I enjoy the people in my guild and I like to be available for help so I stick around regardless.

As of late my primary focus has been to get my 2nd druid and my dk to 80 which I accomplished few days ago. My main goal now is to get their professions leveled and gear them up a bit.

My second druid will be main specced Boomkin and off specced tank. I don't think he'll be tanking anytime soon though because while it can be viewed as kind of pointless to gear up any toon right now due to the approaching expansion, it's rather ludicrous to try and do that and acquire a second set of gear. Of course because I have so much experience as a druid I already know how to tank so there shouldn't be too much of a learning curve besides getting used to the new abilities that will be available soon.

My dk will be DW frost dps for main spec and for off spec I haven't really decided yet. I have no clue how to tank with him right now so that will definitely take some research on my part. Also as previously stated it would be kind of pointless to try and get a second set of gear when I'm still working on his first set. I really enjoy playing as frost dps because I like the skill that's required to play it (like feral dps) and I just think frost dk's are cool.

Hopefully I'll be able to get both toons in to ICC some time before the expansion ships until then most of my playtime consists of farming and sitting in LFG. Bigbody will be doing the same as well to try in an effort to build up his bank lol.

Good Reason there needs to be a WoW version of AA

2010-10-04T07:53:00.000-07:00

With the start of classes and all, I've been really busy getting situated so I decided that I would take a short break from WoW. After looking over my schedule for the next few weeks I told myself that I wouldn't play. I wouldn't until I reached a point where I could play comfortably and not feel stressed because I knew there were more pertinent things that I should be attending to i.e. grad school apps and things like that. I told myself this to help me be proactive because I figured the less distractions I had the more proactive I would be. But in all honesty though, there is always something to do and I am so easily distracted so I in fact would never not be busy enough to feel comfortable to play for whatever allotted time.

Well I was proactive for a couple of weeks then I gave in and renewed my subscription to hop back in to game play. Oh yea did I mention that I made my resolution at about the end of August/ beginning of September and I renewed my subscription officially towards the end of September. So I didn't do too badly. But what can I say, I can’t stay away. Lol, and during the time that I suspended my account purposely (because I figured that would help me stay less distracted) I couldn't help but stay up to date on all the cataclysm changes (this definitely was counterproductive to me avoiding being distracted). I'm sure most who are interested already check stuff like that out but I think I'll post some stuff here as well as I see fit. On that note stay tuned! :)