Collin Raye has this one particular song that Cassie knows is probably my favorite song ever, a song that speaks to me of everything in my entire life, and how I feel about it. Probably a “I’m old” thing, but every time I hear Collin Raye sing the song, I get one of those flashback montage things in my head.

Well, Collin kinda hinted that the next song he was going to sing was going to be this song, so Cassie had enough advance warning to get the camera out and set it to record video.

The beginning is totally shaky-cam, but since Cassie was all twisted up trying to record from our third row seats without having the 1000 gigawatt light from the LCD screen on the camera blind everyone behind us, I think she did fantastic.

Honestly, this is probably my favorite song. It’s not one that goes on the gym workout track, or the “I want to drive 120 mph and feel like a Formula One driver” CD, but it’s the song that always makes me stop whatever I’m doing at the time to turn it up and listen.

I think it says it all that, during what is supposed to be Cassie’s special night to relax and enjoy the music she loves, she still thought of me to record this song. What it says is, I don’t do enough for Cassie.

I hope you enjoy it in the spirit it’s offered. And if you do, I encourage you to take the time to visit Amazon and consider buying one of his CDs. The new gospel one is, IMO,  fantastic. Undefeated is great too.

Happy Mothers Day, everyone.

In case the video embed doesn’t work, here is a direct link.

PS… I don’t get any money for this at all, this is a true word of mouth “I really love this song” thing. YMMV.

I could copy/paste the official text from Blizzard, but I think I can safely bottom-line this.

Leveling zones are empty. Capital cities are full. This is a problem.

If we combine servers, leveling zones would have more players and feel more populated, but the capitols would be crushed in bored max level characters, and you would never find a mailbox again.

So, we will leave capital cities and high-population areas alone on separate servers, but combine the populations in the leveling zones.

Why will we do this?

Time for a direct quote.

Cross-realm zones give us the capability to ensure that level-up zones retain a population size that feels more like the high level areas of the game, leading to a more fun play experience for characters of all levels.

Before I even get into my opinion on this or talk about it, I want to address that statement.

There is one HUGE assumption in that statement. The assumption is, a crowded level-up zone provides a ‘more fun play experience’ than a low population one.

Did anyone ask you if you liked having the mobs and quest drops in a zone all to yourself? Did I miss a poll? The zones aren’t empty even now, they’re just lightly populated. Their new cross-realm zones won’t add people that weren’t there before, it’s just going to take the people that were already there, and pile them in tighter.

Maybe Blizzard is correct in saying that it will be more fun, but that was a statement of fact. They will do this, and it will make the game more fun. Period. End of discussion, because a flat statement like that doesn’t leave any room for discussion, there was a fact, and they are acting on it. If you disagree, then you are opposed to more fun for other people, you meanie, you.

Moving on from semantics, I’d like to talk about this concept like an adult for a few minutes.

I know it’s a stretch, work with me here.

What Blizzard has been coding and testing is a fact. They already had the idea, discussed it, committed resources to it, and have apparently gotten to the implementation stage for the big reveal.

But what made them think of it in the first place?

What I’m wondering is, what was the original intent. What benefits were intended to be gained, and who is going to reap them?

The normal image of a dev workshop is of a group of people tossing out ideas on improvements to the game. The goal of such an imaged gathering is to focus on new ideas that would please the existing customer, and retain them.

This could have come out of such a gathering, but there is another possibility that occurs to me.

They could have been having a meeting to discuss what they could do to try and retain the new players on a free trial account.

Any benefit to long term players who are already at max level would be incidental. We’ve already been through the zones, we’ve reached max level, we are at end game. We likely are in guilds, have friends, can get Heirlooms, and don’t need to group to complete quests in zones that had group quests and encounters nerfed.

It’s a subtle distinction, but this feels like a move intended to address the question, “How do we try and MAKE the world feel vital and alive to new players, when the existing players are all in capital cities?”

I’m going to take a moment to use a real world example to explain why I think this, and why I think it’s a very smart move.

Do you ever watch cooking shows? The ones where Gordon Ramsey goes to some failing restaraunt to tell them why they’re bollix? Or nightclub scenes?

One of the pieces of advice I’ve found fascinating, since I can test it myself when out and about, is to confine the space for the number of guests you’ve got, through things like moveable wall sections or dividers.

By keeping the space cramped, by pushing people close together but not too close, you build an artificial feeling of intimacy, of vitality.

Instead of large, echoing empty spaces that leave the area feeling like a lifeless void sucking all the music out of the room, you cram ‘em all together, bumping into each other and chatting and hearing other people having a good time, noise and movement and energy, vitality.

People enter that kind of environment and feel that they’ve made a good choice; just look at all these other people that are having a great time, I made a wise decision to come here and have a good time too.

The idea is, you can have tons of space, but don’t open it up until the place is really jammed to capacity. People getting crunched in is better for overall business than a few people upset that they feel overcrowded.

That’s why I think that this came mainly from think-tank discussions on how to entice and retain new players, not from a discussion on how to improve the game for the existing playerbase as a whole.

I’m fine with it, I think it’s a good idea. I get that they have long had technology that increases spawn rates based on use… lots of people mining nodes increases spawn rates, that sort of thing. I’m not worried that, after fine tuning, we’re going to have a worse time trying to complete quests competing for drops. I LIKE having people in zones to bump into.

I think it’s a very nice improvement, and I love that the way it’s being implemented, when added to Real ID, means you can have friends leveling alts together and questing together even when they are on two different servers. That freaking rocks.

My point to bring this up, is simply to point out that aside from what is developed and goes live is the question, “Why might they have come up and invested time and money in this?”

That is always a good question to ask. It reveals what a game developer feels is an issue important enough to spend some real money to address.

You can say all sorts of things, but I like the glimpse I think this gives us of what they are worried about…. and what kind of action they’re going to take.

I won’t say I love it just yet, until I get a chance to try it live, but I’m one of those that likes to feel as if I’m part of a living, breathing, vital game world full of people having fun.

With most everyone playing max level characters, server population being what it is means that yes, there are tons of people playing alts… but they are the minority on any given server. By bringing them all together, why, I get to play with others instead of being all alone.

I bet the PvP servers are going to have a blast.

The best thing, the very best thing to me is maybe this will stop Blizzard from their repeated attempts to FORCE max level characters to spend time in low level zones to give a false sense of vitality in areas low level character inhabit.

The games played with removing portals, adding portals, moving portals around, forcing us to go through the Dark Portal to get to Shatt, to take the boat to get to Northrend, to keep us flying and riding around, to design professions that force us to fly all over the world back and forth through leveling zones for dig sites…

Please, stop trying to shoehorn forced zone populations. Let it stop.

Connect the servers up like this, let all the people actually interested in playing in a zone together BE in a zone together, and the World… will be a happy place.

*bonus game… how many assumptions did I make in my analysis? See how many you can count!

I love Rohans posts, he always brings up great topics, adds his opinions or experiences, but then leaves it open for people to think about it or discuss without feeling that by dissenting they’re being confrontational. A happy place to have a conversation instead of an argument.

Silly, silly paladin, didn’t anyone ever tell him the internet is for drama?

When Rohan spoke about larger raid teams being more comfortable for some people to find a home, it spurred all kinds of sparks in my skull.

I’ll be honest with you… I probably don’t have any points to make. I just can’t resist taking a stroll down memory lane, which at my age is more like a 5 lane superhighway straight to the past, where I’ve built a summer cottage the size of the Magic Kingdom, there to spend my days.

I’ll pretend I have a point by contrasting my raiding experiences now compared to what I remember of the old, old, OLD days.

For about the last month, I’ve been raiding twice a week with two different 10-person groups.

On Saturdays I am part of a regular 10 person raid team, and on Thursdays I take part, when I can, in the guilds “Alt Night” Dragon Soul runs on a different character. Lately it’s been my Hunter.

Everyone here by now also knows that I’ve had plenty of opportunity to see the shining lights of awesome to be found in 25 person Looking For Raid.

About that, I’d like to be clear about how I feel concerning Looking For Raid. I bitch about individual players and how there always seems to be that 8% asshat quota that has no trouble getting filled for every single run. I’ll admit it.

Overall though, I remain delighted that Looking For Raid exists, and I still run it on someone every week, without exception. Sometimes on two different characters for different experiences, like Healing and ranged DPS. Still haven’t gotten tired of it, but give me five more months of this same stuff and I’ll be singing a different tune. Or caterwauling, as the case may be.

If dealing with asshats and adding them to /ignore is the price I pay for the fun I’ve had in LFR, then so be it. Give me more room in my Ignore List, and get out of my way, there are internet ultimate shadowy dragons to kill, and swaggering to do in the Eye of Eternity.

I’m pretty current on my World of Warcraft raiding. I’ve even done some Hard Modes on my Druid, up through the first four. Ooh, shiny pretty raiding.

But what about the past?

Casting my mind back over the years, I remember with fondness raiding in 40-person teams with Divine Might.

That line right there tells you this is bullshit. If I’ve somehow convinced myself that 40 person raiding was awesome, I must be delusional.

But really!

Divine Might was an absolute KICK ASS guild on Kael’thas when I first started playing the game, back in the days when the only end game raiding there was to look forward to was 40 person groups.

They had two raid teams, and at the time the progression flow in the game went as follows;

Get to level 60.
Run 5 person instances to get geared enough for the 10 person raids.
Run Blackrock Depths 5 billion times to get various people through the Ony attunement that can’t ever figure out what freaking part of the chain they’re on. Ever.
Start obsessing over Fire Resist gear.
Run 10 person raids in Upper and Lower Blackrock Spire to get geared.
Run 10 person raids in Zul’Gurub and lesser AQ to get geared. Work on Zandalari rep.
Finally join 40 person raid teams, start running Onyxia, never get your Tier. Ever. EVER.
Run Molten Core.
Run Molten Core.
Run Molten Core.
YES we still need Fire Resist gear, FFS!
Run Molten Core.
Run Onyxia. Who still needs their crafted Cloak for BWL?
Run Molten Core.
Run Onyxia.
Run Molten Core.
Run Onyxia.Are we done with the damn cloaks yet? OMIGOD.
Blackwing and AQ, here we go!
Naxx? OMIGOD the attunement go go go!
Oops, too late, expansion is here, 10 man and 25 man raiding is born, bah bye 40′s, time for the guild to eat itself over raid spots.

Ooh, that sounds fun, right?

Amazingly enough, it was. It really was.

Times do change, and we grow and adapt to the game. What was fulfilling before may seem simple and even boring now, but back then, there was a spark, an excitement to follow those quests and get attuned and earn a key and get a Drakefire Amulet forged, and everything else associated with it.

Rohan is in my opinion dead right on larger raiding groups back then having room for more people of all skill levels.

In 40 person raiding, there was absolutely some wiggle room to accomodate people who were not completely obsessed with maxing every last aspect of their raiding toolkit.

I’m not saying “room for idiots”, because it wasn’t that, although a truly great raid team could certainly absorb a few people who didn’t try… or know what to do.

No, I mean people who didn’t live, eat and breathe maximizing every little aspect of their game life.

See, I recall the fight mechanics back then as being a bit more… well, unforgiving than they are these days.

Perhaps this is rose-colored welding goggles in gear, but things back then seemed tuned loose for things like pure DPS or health or healing throughput, and tuned tight for movement, situational awareness, and restraint.

For a given value of ‘Don’t move when Flame Wreath is up or you’ll wipe the damn raid”, anyway.

The key seemed to be that as long as everyone stayed alive, you would win. But in order to stay alive, every single player had to manage their location and movement and switch targeting properly, or they’d pretty much die, and maybe suck a horde of adds in on the group on top of it.

Then you’d cheer from the floor for the rest of the run, short thought it may be.

Let’s just take Onyxia as an example.

Three phases to the battle, each a long phase.

To defeat Onyxia felt immensely satisfying, even though it was like 5 packs of trash in one tunnel, then one big dragon fight in a cavern. In a world where we say Trial of the Crusader proved brief trash fights prior to a raging battle agasint one boss in a single room was a stupid idea, Onyxia felt epic.

Have you done Onyxia, old school or modern remix, and payed attention to the mechanics? They’re quite exciting.

There were fears you had to prepare for… you had to locate yourself where you knew that, when you ate the fear, you would not be forced to run so far that you would facepull the Whelps in the caves to either side.

BUT, you couldn’t be so far away from the Whelp caves that you would eat the Dragon’s breath weapon. And you had to watch where you were standing, because the cracks in the ground would erupt in bursts of lava. And the dragon would knock back whoever had aggro for miles and miles. And the dragon couldn’t be taunted, so you had to generate aggro purely through DPS threat generation, so if you pulled off the tank you were a dead bastard, and since the dragon would likely turn to face the offender, the breath weapon would splash all around.

And that’s just in phase 1!

In phase two, the dragon goes airborne, begins raining down fire and destruction upon the area, whelps burst forth from their caves to swarm the groups, madness and chaos descend… screams, shouts, epic Youtube videos and other delights are the end result.

I loved it. I really did.

My point here is, someone might not have known the ‘optimal’ rotation, have the maxed out gear and enchants, used every single tool in their toolbox… but they were not, in any way, ‘carried’.

They just didn’t put out the maximum possible DPS or Heal, but the mechanics had enough wiggle room to allow for that.

You could reasonably run a raid with a few key dedicated genuises organizing and managing everything at the top level of time investment, a bunch of people in the middle making up the majority of your run theorycrafting and looking for that extra 1% of DPS, and quite a few people at the bottom level that were ‘weekend warriors’.

You really lived or died by the competency of your raid leaders, tanks and primary healers, and they got much respect for their dedication and time investment.

Maybe I remember things differently than they were, or maybe the raiding guild I was in was atypical. Too many years gone by to recall.

Where I’m going with this is, I do agree that back then there was more room for players of all experience levels to fill in one raid from the same guild.

Where I see the drawbacks, and why I wouldn’t ever want to go back, are the difficulties I remember so well in trying to find people you knew you could work together with as a team to fill out all 40 positions, and in coordinating schedules so that all 40 people would actually be online, all at the same time, for the same chunk of playtime.

Those are the two bosses I remember destroying more raids than anything else; attendance and scheduling.

Inevitably, with groups that large, we always, always had people logging in at the last minute without food, flasks or buffs, on the other side of the continent needing summons and begging for handouts.

And then, pre-Repair Bot era, needing to hearth and get re-summoned to fix things still broken from the previous week.

I love that Rohan has given me an excuse to take a trip down memory lane, but all things taken into consideration, while I do miss the epic feel of 40 person raids, I don’t miss the scheduling conflicts, being 15 people short and trying to PUG the rest into MC, and all the rest.

If the argument is that larger raid groups make for more player inclusion in the MMO, and a healthier, more active MMO in the long run, I think Looking For Raid makes for the perfect filler between tight small group raid progression and 5 person instance heroics.

If you really want to relax and pew pew without responsibilities… LFR gives us a home to do it in!

I’d like you to think about something, just for a few minutes.

When you see or hear or read something, or feel it through your fingers, or measure it in the beats of your heart, connections happen in your mind. Your self.

You take the new, add it to the old, and stir.

What comes out of your mouth, what understanding you gain, CANNOT be untouched by all that you were and are.

Everything new you experience, you bring it within yourself, blend it with everything else you have experienced in your life, and from this new combination comes your new feelings and understanding on what it all means.

Meaning is not absolute. The meaning you get is dependent on everything else about you that makes you… you.

I say this, to ask that, the next time you see or hear or read something and you feel offended, outraged, hurt, pissed or just ready to lash out and hurt someone because of the bad feelings inside you… take a moment, just a moment, and make sure that you are righteously pissed at the right person, for the right reasons.

Just do a gut check that you’re going to tee off and unleash hell on the right person, for the right reasons, without adding your own prejudices and fears and hatreds and feelings based on what other completely unrelated people did to you sometime in the past.

Don’t bottle up what you feel… but make sure your target deserves it before you unleash.

If you take that moment, that deep breath, that gut check, and the person or thing or issue in your opinion still deserves the fury of a thousand exploding stars be heaped upon it…

Have fun. Vent and be free.

If you choose to take any feelings of rage or offense and lash out immediately and put the pressure on other people for them to change to make you feel better…

Well, I take what I see, hear and feel, and I bring it inside too. I blend it in with everything I have experienced in my life, and I come to my own conclusions.

If someone comes all across as an asshat, instead of venting all the time I tend to just ignore that person or write them out of my life from that point on, so the result tends to be pretty peaceful.

To me, life is too short and time too precious to waste either.

Be very afraid.

No, on second thought, you should be shitting your pants right about now.

My 9 year old son is joining LFG random teams, and I am coaching him on what to do in the background.

Damn.

You know, I used to make jokes about the ultimate power I held. I have a son who I can teach any kind of crazy shit to, and he’d believe it. For a while, at least. If I was convincing, sincere and made an effort to keep my story straight, it is entirely plausible that I could raise him believing that almost anything is really reals.

Amazing.

I did not use my powers for evil, unless you count sitting him on my lap and training him to say “Baby versus Rhino” and giggle while yet an infant, using my Penny Arcade t-shirt as a visual cue.

Oh yeah, that’s right. Baby. RHINO! *giggle*.

Mostly, they only giggle at rhinos. Mostly.

Okay, so there was that whole ‘take pictures of Disney characters’ butts’ thing, but hey, if I took a sneaking pic of your booty would you hold it against me?

Don’t answer that.

And if that was cool, we could maybe overlook that whole “posted it on the internet for millions to, err hundreds to… okay, for Frank to see” thing?

Note to self… don’t ask dangerous questions, or you might get a visit from The Law. We don’t got no truck with The Law, we’re all about teh kaoS around here, baby.

So.

My son is in ur groups, whacking ur mobs.

I have coached him carefully.

The rules as I made them known for a beginning are;

1. Never get in front of the tank, for that is how you face pull.
2. Never attack before the tank does, for that is how you tag team aggro.
3. Never taunt, and take Growl off your pet, for that is how you yank aggro.
4. Target a mob, attack with everything you’ve got, and if the nameplate (Threat Plates) turns red, switch to a different target immediately.
5. Always pay attention at all times. You never know when the tank will run and pull something.
6. If you are getting eaten, run over and stand on top of the tank.
7. If you are attacking as melee, get behind the bad guy and TEAR UP HIS BUTT!
8. Pass on ALL LOOT, unless it is the correct TYPE of armor or weapon and STATS.

It’s fairly simple. It is a beginning.

He started by entering instances on his Goblin Hunter, who at the time was a freshly minted 15. Cassie and I didn’t have anyone on Horde side at all to run with him, and I had given him the options for leveling;

• The Questor: Quest through the zones, killing and exploring as you go.
• The Grinder: Ignore quest objectives, kill anything and explore anything you like.
• The Grouper: Queue for randoms and pass the time between queues however you’d like.
• The PvPer: Queue for BGs to kill other people, and pass the time between battlegrounds however you’d like.
• The Skilled Worker: Grind Archeology and Gathering professions to gain level up XP.

Of course, you can mix and match however you’d like, but it’s easy to forget that there are a lot of options for gaining XP and leveling. What would he choose for his Hunter?

He chose to Group, and kill stuff and explore while waiting.

I was a little… nervous when I let him loose.

I’m sorry, but the fact is… a lot of players are pricks. It is what it is, and I’m not saying there are more pricks in WoW than in other games, but there ARE a lot of pricks out there. I tune it out, but we’re talking a nine year old, and I’m not going to shut his Party Chat off when there may be important information in there from the tank or healer.

So, I sat there hoping that, armed with my advice, he would not attract the ire of the asshats.

I don’t hold out much hope for over the long run, he’ll see it and have to learn to deal with it maturely, because there are a lot of pricks that attack people in groups without any basis for their hostility at all. There are people that just pick someone at random, and unleash their inner asshat all over them. Nothing you can do to avoid it, all you can do is recognize that the problem isn’t something you did, it’s just them being them.

Not something I like contemplating for my son, any more than I like seeing it happen to any other stranger out there that may be just like my son.

Regardless, you don’t learn or grow by being wrapped in bubble wrap and sheltered in a box. You can’t prepare yourself to fight evil if you don’t even know it exists. In our modern world, learning to deal with internet bullies and online harassment is probably one of the most important lessons we need, so might as well get started sometime.

I’ve watched him in instances, and he’s outstanding.

He doesn’t say a word in chat, because he doesn’t type all that fast, although he does like typing in “/say Hello”.

Regardless, he’s been rocking the place, and I’ve seen other players offer to trade him items that he could use, and I have yet to see anyone be mean to him at all.

In fact, he’s been doing so well that when he wanted to queue in randoms on his Feral Cute Kitty O’ Doom Druid, even though he is level 56 and had some massive places in his instance list, I let him give them a try.

He did so well in a Sunken Temple run, that the others asked if they could requeue as a group and do it again. And again. And again, even.

So, he’s doing well. I’m very proud of him.

Throughout it all, he finds the funniest things to get interested in.

I’ve been letting him go solo to see what he’ll get into. I’ve been pushing him on his Death Knight, who is level 82, to explore. As I’ve said to him, “there is very little in the entire world that has any hope of hurting you. You can travel wherever you’d like, get in the face of just about anything, and eat their lunch. Except here (points to Twilight highlands).

So, why not go looking?

He spent some time killing Hogger and clearing out the Stormwind Stockades. He liked running the instance solo, and feeling powerful.

When we did Children’s Week, he saw all of Nagrand, and went nuts.

His big thing has always been ‘rock guys’. I don’t know what it is, exactly, but he has loved elementals in the game for as long as I’ve played WoW, and rock dudes are his favorites.

He would love to see me kill rock dudes, and watch them split up into smaller and smaller rock dudes. Absolute favorites.

Well, he saw the rock dudes in nagrand, and spent the next two days killing rock dudes, then water guys, then I showed him the fire guys on the Elemental Plateau… he had a blast.

Then he went off the grid. I was raiding, and wasn’t watchig him too close. Next time I looked over, he was in Shadowmoon Valley, and he went on a demon killing spree that was unprecedeted.

He found the entrance to Black Temple all on his own.

He LOVED killing Uvoros the two-headed demon dog. The GIANT two headed demon dog.

That led me to show him the Petopia website, and I had to bookmark it onto his desktop and let him spend an hour browsing the awesome pictures of tamable pet designs.

And then… he went to Hellfire Peninsula, and without any prompting from me in any way, began hunting Fel Reavers across the entire landscape.

And now… he has come full circle.

He has discovered the Raging Colossuses, the giant rock guys around the red crystal just to the west of the Temple of Telhamut.

These are the holy grail of rock guys.

You see, when you start attacking these guys, they get a little smaller as you damage them, AND they make MORE rock guys.

He has also noticed… the Raging Colossus has, ahem, “Tushie Cheeks”.

This has been a new source of giggling amusement.

To the Blizzard graphics designer that decided ‘rock guys’ needed tushie cheeks? Well played, sir. Well played.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I am being summoned to watch as my son kills another Fel Reaver, or, as he says, Watch him “Demolish a Fel Reaver of Doom”.

Watching my son destroy a Fel Reaver in fiendish delight, and exclaim with joy as the pieces fall apart and drop, scattering all over the place, is magical.

But Blizzard had suggested, along with account shared Achievement and Pets for Pet Battle, they were thinking, possibly, maybe, probably not but could be, that they would make Mounts be shared across accounts as well.

I kept that on the down low. Some things are just too sweet to believe until it happens.

According to MMO Champion (and WoW Insider, of course) the latest Beta build saw Mounts go shared account wide (at least, server wide).

It may be buggy, it may have gaps or quirks, but it’s playable. The time is now. The Mounts have come upon us.

Oh dear lord, yes.

You know, Pets are awesome. My main, Bigbearbutt the Feral Druid, has over 150 pets. I think I’m at 158 now, and I’ve got room to grow. Haven’t gotten any Darkmoon pets yet, for example. I could, conceivably, reach 175 pets before Mists is launched.

But Mounts… ah yes, mounts.

I love mounts. But my Druid is also my main for reputation, for doing stuff, for being there when really cool shit drops… and I only ever use the same three mounts.

I ride along the ground on my Sethekk Halls chicken mount, an iconic mount once requiring a Druid just to activate the boss encounter, thus coming to be thought of as “that damn Druid mount that never drops”.

I fly through the sky snatching Herbs in my Epic Flight Form. Damn, I love my flight form. Always have, always will. Did you know that in the last Beta build I played, you could choose either the Epic OR the normal appearance of Flight Form? Pretty cool, huh?

And then, of course, I have my Epic Dragon Form. It’s mine, and it’s exclusive to Druids. Druids only.

Oh, shush.

This… this changes everything. Now, I actually have a REASON to go out on my Druid and hunt for moar mounts. I have an excuse to go run through old instances, farm rep, and do all the things that I like doing anyway.

But now, instead of being asked what I’m doing, and saying “Oh, just running through some stuffs looking for transmog gear”, I can say, “Farming mounts, of course.”

Or better yes, “Farming mounts for my Priest. Of Course.”

Oh, it’s going to be so much fun!

And so painful, running stuff and not seeing things drop for the 3,000th time trying!

I know there are some folks that will find reasons to complain, but I can assure you, I am nothing but 100% delighted. Those characters that earned multiple reps that other characters already had, just to get mounts, were not time wasted… because I have enjoyed those mounts for all the time since I earned them. There was no waste involved. I enjoyed playing the game to get them, and I enjoyed playing the game with the mounts. Now, even more characters can have the same opportunity.

Yummy!

Has anyone ever told you this before?

“Oh, it was no big deal. It was just a blown fuse. I replaced it, we’re good to go”

Just so you know, that saying is a test.

A lot of things in life are tests, and it can be hard to recognize it when one comes around.

This post is in the way of a public service message for those of you that aren’t all too sure what “a blown fuse” means, and don’t want to look stupid or ignorant when someone tells you this in the future.

From now on, instead of nodding your head and walking away feeling vaguely worried, I’m going to arm you with science so you know what they’re saying… and what pointed questions to ask.

A Firm Grounding

Here’s the deal. If you’re reading this, you’re plenty smart enough and educated enough to understand what a fuse is, and what it means. You might just need a frame of reference.

Don’t panic. This won’t get technical.

You know your electronics runs on a power source we call electricity.

There are lots of technical terms used when discussing electricity, how it’s measured, how to calculate volts and amps, etc.

You don’t need to know any of that to live your life.

What you need to know is, how does it make that iPod spin out music, and can my iPod electrocute me if I drop it in water?

Quick answer: No.

We can functionally describe electricity as being similar to water. Water that is unaffected by gravity… but that loves finding a path to the deep, dark underworld.

What do I mean?

Let’s look at how water functions.

Water, when flowing, pushes things in front of it. The force of water pushing on things in it’s path can be used to get work done. The stronger the flow (or current), the more it can push, the more it can do.

Electricity works much the same way.

Picture a flowing stream or babbling brook. If there is a building on the riverbank, and that building has a waterwheel dipping into the river’s current, the force of the flowing water pushes on the paddles that are at the bottom, moving them forward, turning the wheel so that the next paddle dips into the current, and the rotation of the wheel continues, forever and ever, amen, ’til the river rises and the cows come home.

That waterwheel rotates on a shaft, and the shaft goes into the building, and what you get is a turning shaft inside a big building, powered by the flow of water. You can then attach stuff like gears and things, linkages and doodads, and get working machinery… powered purely by water. Triphammers, mill wheels, saws and drills and all sorts of stuff can be powered in this way.

Well, electricity is the same exact thing.

Except… instead of electricity flowing as water does, pulled down by gravity following the lowest surface it can find, electricity is special water that flows wherever it can find a conductive surface to carry it into the ground.

Electricity always heads for the easiest, simplest, fastest connection to the deep earth it can find. It follows the path of least resistance.

What is a conductive surface? Well, it depends on how strong the current of the electricity is, really.

Things like metal and water can be great conductors. Electricity touching metal will go straight to wherever the metal is touching the ground at the best point.

Rubber and the air can both be very good insulators, blocking the flow of electricity dead in it’s tracks. Plastic is pretty good at that, too.

But the more power, the more force, the more oomph in the electricity, the more resistance (or insulation) the electricity can overcome.

At high enough levels, the electricity can even jump through the air, conducting through the air itself to get to the ground. We call that an arc, and that’s some serious high power fry your ass mojo.

Why, if there is enough current in the electricity, YOU can be a conductor! You are a lot more conductive than the air, by the way. A LOT more conductive than the air.

Safety First

Let’s have a brief experiment to illustrate this point.

Say you take a metal knife, and you stick it in a wall outlet… the electricity will instantly see that if it flows through the metal knife, and then through your body, it can reach the ground through your knees where you’re touching it, and off it goes.

At this point, you will either get blasted away from the outlet because the electricity flowing through your body from your hand to your knees caused your muscles to spasm, OR you will get locked rigidly to that knife, taking the juice constantly, because your muscles all just convulsed and locked up.

This can be a fun experiment, because if your friend or loved one sees you there unmoving or unresponsive, they might run over to grab you and pull you away… and IF they are suddenly a better conductor (say they are in bare feet while you’re wearing jeans) than you are, now the electricity sees a BETTER conductive path of least resistance through them, and BOOM, they get zapped too.

Quick fun fact: In the Marines, when you’re going to work with electricity, we used to make safety devices. What these were, were long wooden sticks covered in rubber, with a metal hook screwed into one end and also covered with rubber. They were for when a Marine grabbed a live wire, convulsed, and you had to get them free without electricuting yourself. You could grab the 8′ long rubber-coated hook off the wall, and either hook them and drag them away or just whack them good with the rubber stick.

Oh no? Oh, hell yes.

Are you paying attention now?

Just to ease your worried mind, you should know that there are two kinds of electricity… direct current (DC) and alternating current (AC). The kind of electricity in your wall outlets and in your home is all AC, or alternating current. Think of it as special electricity that pulses instead of just staying strong and steady. It pulses so fast you wouldn’t notice it without special gear, but your muscles will know the difference, because if you get zapped by AC, the first pulse may lock your muscles up and cause them to contract but the next pulse will convulse you and blast you free.

Direct Current, now… that shit will lock you up, holmes.

Where do you mostly find DC (Direct Current)? Why you find it INSIDE a lot of pwoerful electronics like TVs, stereos, microwave ovens, motors, air conditioners, all that kind of stuff. AFTER where the AC power cord comes into the gizmo, goes through a transformer and some other stuffs, and gets distributed throughout the thingie as nice, smooth DC voltage.

THIS IS WHY YOU AREN’T SUPPOSED TO SCREW AROUND INSIDE ELECTRONICS WITHOUT TRAINING. 

So.

Electricity is like water, it pushes stuff in front of it. It is supposed to start at, say, a wall outlet or breaker box. Then it flows through a conductive material, like metal wire, that is covered in a insulating material like rubber to keep it IN the wire, goes into a gizmo, pushes stuff around inside the gizmo to make it move and get work done… and then, believe it or not, goes right back out a second insulated metal wire and back into the wall outlet, return to sender.

It makes a complete circuit.

This is why, if you look at an AC power cord, it is two wires, each wrapped in rubber to isolate them from each other. One is the supply of juice TO teh gizxmo, the other is the return pipe FROM teh gizmo. They are commonly called the ‘Hot” and the “Neutral”, respectively. The hot is usually coated with black rubber, and the neutral is coated with white, when found in American wiring diagrams or inside a junction box.

You often also find a third wire. It is colored green inside gizmos, and it is called the ground wire.

Why? Because the ground wire does NOT carry any juice at all. None. It is dead as a doornail… and it is there to save your life.

The ground wire is attached to the deepest, darkest pit of black underground wetness there is anywhere near your house. It is THE favorite path for current to flow.

The ground wire is plugged into your gear, fixed to metal parts like the case… and is supposed to be a safety. If the hot or the neutral gets cut or shorted, instead of you getting killed by touching the metal case of your stereo, the power goes through the case, to the ground wire, and down to that inky it of blackness where all electricity finds it’s home instead.

It also provides a wonderful way of making sure you don’t get outside sources of electricity, like static electricity, interfering within your delicate electronics like your Xbox 360. If you zap the case, the ground wire bleeds the electricity off to ground so it never zaps the guts of the machine.

But what about fuses, you idiot!

It is normal to put a fuse in the wire at different points.

Breakers in your electrical panel in your house are, essentially, fuses too.

What a fuse is, is a wire designed to melt at a certain temperature, enclosed in a VERY insulative holder. It’s just the same as wire, but if it gets too hot, it melts. 

Fuses melt when they get too hot, and when that happens, no more path for the current to flow. Electricity stops flowing, because the wire just got cut. The gizmo stops working… because the electricity HAS to flow for it to push or otherwise make the gizmo do stuff.

So, if a fuse is designed to melt when it gets too hot, what causes it to heat up?

Electricity does.

More specifically, the amperage in the electricity.

What is amperage? 

You don’t need to know exactly what it is, but it can help to think of it like this.

Now, this is completely and totally wrong, and yet it may help. Professionals, if you think I’ve taken liberties before this, hold onto your hats. It’s all in a good cause.

When you see a sign saying # of volts, # of amps, think of it like this.

The amount of volts is the size of pipe the electricity is traveling in. The more volts, the bigger the flow of electricity can be, the more work it COULD do.

The amount of amps is the actual POWER, the push, the big honking wave that is flowing through the pipe, doing the actual work.

To complete this horrible analogy, the stuff that the electricity is pushing in whatever gizmo you’ve got? That is the resistance. The more it resists the amps trying to push it, the more amps you need to provide to get it to go.

Here is why you should care.

You could have 480 volts on the line, a huge pipe. But if there are only .2 milliamps in the circuit, an itty bitty amount of current, you can grab the bare wire in your hand and only feel a tickle.

If you lick a 9 volt battery, getting your tongue on both prongs at once and feel the electricity flow across your taste buds from one pole to another, it won’t blow your ass up because the amps are very low.

But if you grabbed that same 480 volt wire, and there were 20 or more amps on there… if those 20 amps of force decided to flow through YOU as the fastest way to get to the ground, if YOU became the “path of current flow”, then you can die, cooked from the inside out, with your feet blown off and still steaming in your boots.

I’m not kidding around here.

What makes a fuse melt?

Amps of force performing work, pushing through things that offer resistance, generate heat.

If there is too little wire to handle all the amps flowing through it, that wire will, literally, melt.

The reason you have circuit breakers in your house is to prevent you plugging in too many things on one circuit or loop of wire, drawing a SHOTLOAD of amps through the wires in the walls of your house to power all that crap, melting the wires buried in your walls and setting your house on fire.

The circuit breaker is a fuse, designed to trip out or ‘break’ when it gets too hot… and capable of being reset. It trips when there are more amps flowing through it than the wires attached to it are capable of handling.

Circuit breakers are designed to be reset, on the assumption you know enough to unplug stuff from the appropriate outlet when one pops. Old school power panels had actual fuses that you had to replace… and many skilled and brilliant electricians would replace them, all right. With copper pennies. Sigh.

So, pop quiz because you know the answer now. What does a blown fuse mean?

It means that something got so hot it melted a piece of wire. It melted a piece of wire that was designed to melt for a reason; to protect something else from getting damaged from too much force/amps/electricity/power.

So now we come to the main event.

If a fuse blew, it didn’t do it out of spite, or vindictiveness.

That fuse blew because something somewhere else went wrong, and the fuse melted to protect your valuable shit, or even your life.

Why your life?

Because the most common place to stick a fuse is right where the wire comes into your gizmo from the power cord plugged into the wall. If that fuse melted, something somewhere in your gizmo suddenly decided to suck so much juice out of the wall it melted a wire… melted that wire before it melted something else. Or tripped a breaker in your power panel.

Or shorted right through you, blowing off your feet.

So if someone says to you, ”Oh, it was no big deal. It was just a blown fuse. I replaced it, we’re good to go”, the very next question you need to ask is, “What caused the fuse to blow?”

That is the test.

To know that a blown fuse is not the problem, a blown fuse PROTECTED you from the problem.

What caused the fuse to blow? Because if all you did was replace the fuse, what the hell is stopping whatever it was from causing it to blow again?

What if the reason the fuse blew, was that there is water somewhere inside the gizmo. Electricity likes to find the easiest path to ground, right? And water makes for a good conductor. the electricity doesn’t want to do work, it doesn’t want to flow through any resistance, it’s always looking for the easiest way out.

So there is water, and sometimes the gizmo moves, the water flows, touches somewhere that has electricity, and the electricity says “Ah HAH! I can bypass almost all this other shit, flow right through the water, take a shortcut, and go through this here control knob, through that person’s hand, down their arm, and ground myself on the metal arm of the chair. YAHOO! FREEDOM AT LAST!”

Kaboom.

Or maybe, and god this is common, maybe you’ve got a motor that is powered by electricity in your gizmo. Like your car. Or your air conditioner. The motor is physically moving, spinning round, from the force of electricity pushing it.

It takes a lot of amps to physically move a motor. Lots more than your iPod needs. Rule of thumb, if the electricity has to get a motor physically moving, it’s got a LOT of juice running through it. Moving parts take power.

The motor has all this power running through it, some insulation starts wearing away, or the bearing that lets the shaft turn nice and smooth starts binding up making the motor use a LOT more power to get that shaft to turn, and the heat from the increased amp draw builds up.

The fuse blows. It gets hot and melts, protecting your motor from turning into slag.

If this is caught right away, the motor can usually be fixed. Maybe by something as simple and easy as putting a bit of grease or oil on the bearing that the shaft turns on, reducing how hard the motor has to work.

But what do I see all the damn time?

“Fuse blew, I replaced it and got the device back in service.”

“What caused it to blow?”

“I dunno, probably just a power spike.”

“Nothing else went down, and the lights didn’t flicker. Go check it out, find out why it blew.”

“Okay.” *very grumpy*

A week passes.

The motor ‘burns out’, from too much heat because instead of greasing the motor bearings, the jackass replaced the fuses and didn’t ‘waste his time ‘troubleshooting the core problem.

I look inside at the fuses, wondering why the $20 fuses did not pop, protecting the $3000 motor from melting by blowing first, like they were designed to.

I see that the fuses, which are supposed to blow if the electrical current flow exceeds 20 amps, have been replaced by 30 amp fuses.

It takes a lot more heat to blow a 30 amp rated fuse than a 20 amp rated fuse. If the amps never rise above 30 amps, the wire inside will never heat up enough to melt.

But that motor sure did love the extra amps that drove it far harder than it was ever designed to, at a temperature it’s wires weren’t designed to handle. Wires melted, or maybe even the motor windings.

Meltdown. $3000 motor burnt to shit. Repairs and rewinding will probably cost about $1200.

Oh wow, but at least those $20 fuses are still in great shape, and the tech that decided to swap 20 amp fuses for 30 amp fuses so he wouldn’t have to keep replacing them when they blew over and over?

Well, at least he had some piece and quiet for that week.

Wrapping this up

Now you know what a blown fuse really means. It means more juice, more power, more amps, more OOMPH just went through the thing than it was designed to safely handle, and the fuse blew before something SERIOUS happened. Read: expensive or dangerous.

If you simply replace the fuse, you are giving whatever it was a chance to do it again, shocking the system and risking damage from the fuse melting too SLOWLY to stop the big jolt of power from going through and doing it’s damage to the sensitive guts of your gear first.

If you replace the fuse with a BIGGER fuse, what you’re doing is saying, “I don’t like to live safely, or to save money. Fuck it, let the motor burn, just as long as it stops bugging me by popping all the time.”

Yes, a spike of power from the source can cause a fuse to blow or breaker to pop. A lightning strike on the main supply coming into your house, etc.

But if it did… you should have seen lights flicker, or had some other indication than just one thing popping a fuse.

At the very least, I hope that now you will feel confident whenever you are talking to someone about your car, or stereo, or air conditioner, or circuit breaker, to call them on the carpet if they feed you that old “It was just a fuse” line.

Today, it was just a fuse. Tomorrow, it’s the water pump, or the fan motor, or the overhead crane drive, or whatever it may be.

Or something compound in your car. I don’t care what it is, if it’s compound, it’s money.

This may not have helped you, but by God I’m glad to get that off my chest. Freaking idiot techs, I swear I’m going to start using the Big Safety Stick™ to give them a current test they won’t soon forget..

If you know where that came from, you may feel a sense of foreboding.

Don’t.

The word I bring you is mostly positive, much as our species is ‘mostly’ harmless.

I, that is me, the player sitting here in this chair, is in a raid team.

Ho no? Ho yas!

And even weirder… I’m raiding as a healing Holy Priest.

Yeah, I may have to give some of you a few minutes. That’s cool, I’ve got chips, I’ll go take a break, be back in a bit.

.

..

Okay, *munch munch*, we all set to continue?

All right, damnit, how do you eat chips and not get cheese crap on the keyboard? Fine, I guess I am destined to live my WoW playing life bereft of cheese-flavored snacks.

What? Oh right, healing as a Priest in a raid.

Yeah, Penumbria has done a little raiding. Only a little. If you really cared, you could even Armory her to look at progression, if only to see that I’ve only raided a few times.

I have a few observations to make, inspired by Allison Roberts’ latest WoW Insider post.

I ran LFR as a Healer from start to finish, several times, and I have healed Dragon Soul 10 person normal a few times.

Point the First: I am here to tell you, without reservation, that it is more challenging to heal LFR than Normal.

When I started with my Priest as a healer in heroics and LFR, it was challenging. But, by the grace of God and the teachings of Tyben, I made it through. I struggled, I actually used my cooldowns and learned what did what for whom, and felt I was doing well.

How is that for a blog name, btw? The Teachings of Tyben. I know I’d read it.

And then came the day I filled in as a healer for Team Snuffleaupagus, and it was, comparatively, easy.

Comparatively.

First, in a real raid the people all stood in the right places, clicked the little buttons at the right times, and used THEIR cooldowns.

That, all by itself, was a game changer.

Before I ran in Normal, I never knew that if everyone that gets a red beam on the crystal on Morchak STANDS ON THE CRYSTAL, the crystal gets much smaller.

I’d never seen it shrink before. Huh.

Also, did you know that it’s not normal for half the raid to be below half their hit points after every Hour of Twilight? I know, right? In an actual raid, where people actually clicky their buttons, they don’t almost die every time for me to frantically spam heals!

This is a new concept for me.

And, oh wow, did you know that in normal raids, when the tank has the hideous amalgamation, he actually holds the thing without ANY stacks until it’s at about 12%, and only THEN drags it through all the pools of blood?

OMIGOD, right? What kind of lame raid is it where you don’t have an amalgamation doing blasting AoE damage to the entire group at 6 or 7 stacks for the whole fight?

And don’t even get me started on the gunship and Twilight Onslaught.

It really does come down to this one, simple thing – healers in LFR are expected to heal other people through being rock-bottom lazy, inconsiderate, stupid motherfuckers that stand in place and shoot, and to heck with the rest of the raid.

I am not surprised that in LFR queue, healers have about a 3 second wait time. No surprise whatsoever.

Point the Second: If people don’t almost die, they get sloppy. 

I have been running all sorts of heroics and even a normal Stonecore, and I’ve seen one common theme in all of them.

Someone will be a little boneheaded, almost every time. Pushing the ‘pull for the tank’ boundaries and taking some hits to the face to spike the DPS charts, ignore the puddles on the ground, don’t run out of Fel Flame, etc.

If you let them drop to almost dead and then heal some but not all of the way back up, they get careful. They manage their shit.

If you just heal them up with uber lightning-fast reflexes… they get sloppier and sloppier until they don’t get out of anything, ever, and you’ve got an extra wanna-be tank.

They slack off on being careful or playing properly… and you get punished more for doing your best.

Point the Third: If you get raid gear, it gets MUCH, MUCH better.

Once you get some actual gear, the comfort curve goes through the roof.

I am not a good healer. Okay, maybe I’m good by LFR standards, but I’m not good by good raid team healer standards.

But I now have decent raid level gear, and I am now finding that I’m careless as hell of mana management, because my regen and tools are great, and my HPS are high enough to keep me from having to cast as many heals for the same effectiveness.

I have begun, in heroics, to be able to heal people through the stupid. And to still have more than 100,000 mana afterwards.

If you got a ton of Valor gear, you could do this too. I am not special. I cannot stress it enough, a Holy Priest in 397 Valor gear is a force to be reckoned with in heroics and LFR. Oh yes, and LFR. Powerful AoE healing? Yes, I think so.

What is it I’m doing, anyway?

This next bit, you can really just stop reading unless you’re actually interested in what I’ve got configured for playing a Holy Priest. Really. No more of the funny. Bah-bye.

There is no secret to what I’m doing. I’m actually still working on adding more tools in, but the basics are my Vuh’Do settings, and a mouse with left, right, middle, and two side buttons.

The mouse button configuration I use as a right-handed player is:

I never said I was an artist. THIS is why I don’t create my own fancy icons, lol.

The point is, these are my fast-response time clicks on a nameplate in Vuh’Do. The only spell I used that isn’t on here is my Holy Word: Sanctuary, which I simply hot key and place.

My spellbar is spread out so that my long cooldown spells AND spells that have 10 second or other multi-second cooldowns are clearly visible, so, for example, I can easily see what the cooldown is until the next time I use Prayer of Mending. Maybe there is an addon like Bad Kitty that shows you when the cooldown wears off on your spells, but I’m okay this way for right now. I don’t lose even a second on my PoM. Or my Circle of Healing, for that matter.

It’s been a lot of fun. Really.

My only gripe is, if I’m in Chakra: heal a single target, then having to Shift-Right Click to do Holy Word doesn’t really flow smoothly. I can nail every single other spell fast and smooth, but that one is apparently outside my ‘panic mode’. In a clutch, I Flash Heal or Greater Heal instead, wasting the power of Holy Word. I’m thinking I could swap with PW: Shield, but the fact is, I don’t use any of the Shift level buttons as much as I could. I can Ctrl-click with the best of them, but my pinkie apparently isn’t as bendy as it should be.

But that’s okay. Realistically, in ‘lazy healer’ LFR mode, I can go into Sanctuary, use PoM on the tank, spread Renew around, CoH and spammed PoH on the raid to top them up, Holy Word glowies on the ground for the bad moments of stacking, and Flash Heal and Greater Heal for the serious business, and do just fine. JUST fine.

And when in doubt and it’s all going to shit?

Divine Hymn is your friend, your best buddy, your long lost lover you meet over a cup of coffee after a few years apart and catch up with. It’s got a short cooldown compared to the stuff other healers get, too, so use it.

If I have a moral to this story, it would be this.

If you tried to heal in LFR, saw how bad it was and thought, “Hell with this, if it’s this bad here raiding must suck”, don’t give up hope just yet. With solid gear, good LFR and heroic stuff, and omigod the Valor stuff is OP, you will be a powerhouse.

Second, you will come to enjoy those 3 second queue times. No, really. I run heroics JUST to get past the Valor cap so I can get extra Justice Points to convert into Honor Points to buy heirloom PvP gear for mogging. And come on, you know me and pugs. If I’m willing to queue as a healer in a Stonecore pug just to get some Therazane rep from the killing Ozruk quest, you know it gets pretty damn overpowered.

Really, that’s the main point. If you tried it or are afraid of the learning curve getting in, don’t stress too much. You can always go as Shadow, rack up some Valor, buy healing gear and get healing drops, and step in as a first time healer already in OP gear. If you use the single-target optimized Chakra in 5 person heroics… you will not have to struggle very much, if at all., to learn as you go.

Just remember, especially on Mannoroth… Fade is your very bestest friend. Right after Divine Hymn.

There. I promised Tyben I was gonna write about Holy Priests. That is about all I can say about them, besides how healing as a Holy Priest gives me an ever-increasing opportunity to see people at their very worst, and learn to love the new reporting tools.

Oh yeah, one last thing. Once you get powerful enough to heal ‘em through the stupid, ah the Skinner games you can play.

A TITLE.

I’d like to whisper in the ears of some of my friends at Blizzard who may someday sit around a table discussing the possibility of Sargeras becoming a final expansion boss.

I know, the Dark Titan Sargeras. Right? Not even remotely possible as a boss, right?

If World of Warcraft were a Marvel comic book, then Deathwing would have to be the Galactus to us little people of Azeroth, and by using the Dragon Soul we totally pulled a Reed Richards with the Ultimate Nullifier on his ass. Except we actually pulled the trigger. Try to eat a planet on MY watch and see what happens to you, ya tentacled prick, ya.

Anyway, so Sargeras.

Deathwing is a world shattering terror, and even so, he wouldn’t be much more than a mid-day snack to the all-encompassing might that is the Dark Titan, Sargeras.

But it’s not beyond the realm of imagination that someday we could see Sargeras on the other end of our UI as a targeted boss with a skull level and hit points.

It could happen.

I can even spin an almost plausible web in under 30 seconds.

When Broxigar the Red fell, wounding Sargeras himself, his axe survived and was handed over to our modern-day Thrall by the time-traveling dragon-mage Krasus, who was disguised as an orc shaman at the time.

When Broxigar fell in the past, Malorne was but recently dead at the hands of Archimonde and Cenarius himself was, shall we say, mildly distracted by sorrow.

The magical axe that Cenarius had caused to be created, the same axe Broxigar used to wound Sargeras, was taken almost unnoticed from the world of the past and brought forward.

No big deal, right?

Ah, but now, in our time, Malorne has been reborn! The spirit of nature has been reborn upon the slopes of Mount Hyjal.

What miracles might be possible next?

Could the mighty Ragnaros suffer the final death at last, destroyed within his own realm of fire?

Could evn the mighty Deathwing face destruction?

And if these could fall… might it even be possible to entertain the thought of destroying the one being that represents the ultimate in darkness, sorrow and evil to our world?

The ultimate lord and master of the demons that have plagued us from the beginning, who has sent his pawns against us, who has corrputed others merely to use them as cannon-fodder to throw against us and weaken our resolve?.

Who can say what Malorne might feel, having died and been reborn with the spring.

Who can say but that perhaps the earth has learnt to desire, if not revenge, then retribution.

And lo, here and now, at this time and in this place, during an age of wonders and miracles, comes a weapon forged in the heart of life, given form by Cenarius, sanctified by the utterly selfless and heroic will of Broxigar the Red and baptised in the blood of the Dark Titan itself?

Is it so strange to think that perhaps the developers of Blizzard could make se of that axe as a tool in a mad plan of Cenarius’ to take the fight to Sargeras himself… perhaps by striking at him through a way he might not expect… through the Emerald Dream?

You can never really say that it would be impossible for Sargeras to become a raid boss.

Who can tell what the imagineers behind WoW will come up with in the future? Who could say that we might not someday see an Emerald Dream expansion… with Sargeras as the final boss.

If I were to flesh out the idea, the truth is I would start with Sargeras seeking to attack Azeroth by flanking through the Emerald Dream on his own initiative, and of our entering it to face his forces and fight against his growing influence. As bad as things have been within the Emerald Dream, if Sargeras added his influence to it, it really could poison everything from within.

From that point, building up to using Broxigars Axe as the MacGuffin the final hopes of Azeroth reovlve around becomes simple… but that’s why I dislike it. It’s been done too many times. I’d much prefer a proactive, ‘take it to the boss and get him before he comes after us yet again’ kind of thing.

If it was done really well, we might not even get the usual sappy result you often see in fantasy literature, where the heroes try to take action on their own initiative instead of sitting passively waiting to be gobsmacked, and end up being punished for it to make some kind of point that action or movement is inherently evil and sitting placidly is good. But that is a discussion for another day.

Why not tie in an expansion about the Emerald Dream into having Sargeras as the final raid boss?

Let’s just say they do find a way.

We face Sargeras. And we win.

We, the players, with I am sure a teensy bit of help from The Usual NPCs, face down and destroy Sargeras.

After all of that….

We better not just get a title, is what I’m saying.

If we kill Sargeras, do you think it would be too much to ask to be awarded with a Tabard imbued with a spell that makes those around you genuflect when you activate it?

That’s right… I’m suggesting the killers of Sargeras be awarded a Tabard so that others beholding your incredible awesome leetness know to literally kneel before you in admiration.

They can do it. They have the technology. Both the Piccolo of the Flaming Fire and the Tabard of the Protector are in the game.

Or maybe you think that would be a little over the top?

PS… I was also thinking how fun it would be to have a Priest spell called Genuflect, that was a long cooldown AoE heal that, as a side-effect, made those players affected by the healing momentarily kneel. But then I snapped out of my momentary madness. Seriously, wtf was I thinking, even for a moment? What a horrendously terrible idea. /shudder

I took my turn-based novel off the sidebar, and began working on finishing steps to get it ready for release as an e-book a while ago.

It’s been a while, and I haven’t talked about the project because it’s been stuck in my head.

All the pieces were there, I liked the story, I love the characters, everything was in place and just waiting on me to give it that push.

And I was stalled dead in the water.

My first issue was, I have come to like the main characters. I’ve heard it said by other writers that the main characters can come alive in your mind, they become real people, and you no longer write about them so much as get down on the page what they really do. They take over with a very real life of their own.

Jessie did that. She is as real as anyone else, at least to me. I feel I know her heart very well, and what she has already endured actually brought me to tears towards the end of the last section I had written and published here.

But Terin had also come to life.

I no longer wanted to write the book I was writing, because I wanted both of them to have their OWN series. They both demanded from me their own time as the entire focus of the story. I didn’t want to keep switching back and forth. I wanted it all, and right now.

Well, I know who’s in charge here. I put my foot down. I have a story to tell, and they’re just going to have to deal with it.

Funny, the story kind of stalled there. Kind of like Terin and Jessie were both pouting… or holding out, each expecting me to cave. Grr.

But I knew I could work through it if I just thought about it. A perfect solution would come to me.

But then, I realized something worse was happening.

I was no longer happy with anything I had written.

Oh, when I read it over, it seemed fine. Lots of editing to make, obviously, tons of things to clean up and cut down and polish. But that wasn’t it. Something was fundamentally wrong with my story.

I finally had a brief, shining moment of revelation tonight.

The problem is, it’s not MY story!

No, not that it was a collaboration. nothing like that. My friends Manny and James did a great job on directing the behavior of their characters, that wasn’t the issue.

The problem was that I wasn’t writing a story wholly in my voice and style, I was trying to give my friends a game experience, a story setting and word style that would make them comfortable.

I was bending my own inclinations in writing and trying to intentionally write ‘heroic fantasy’.

Seriously, is that what I actually write here? Is that what my strengths are? Hell no!

I have done a quick re-read of some sections, and now I see the parts I like best, that flow best for me, are those that I wrote with my own voice breaking out of the mold briefly for what I thought I could get away with, before returning to more ‘traditional’ story elements.

Well, shit.

Blogger, take thine own advice. I’ve got a voice, and it’s the voice I’m comfortable with. That’s the voice I need to use in writing the books!

So… already, the story is falling into place in my head. It’s a whole new beginning. Jessie and Terin are the same, the basic foundation of the story is the same, but how it’s going to be told, and what happens along the way…

Maybe Terin and Jessie knew what they were telling me after all.

I have some ideas. I have some seriously exciting ideas that are sparking all kinds of boomfizzle in my brain, I just coined that word. It seems awesome from the inside but may be pathetic when out for the world to see.

I’m eager to find out how this goes, and I hope you’ll all come along for the ride.