Joel’s Scattered Thoughts

Here’s another guide to Feral Druid Leveling Spec/Rotations. Now I just need to actually find time to level my druid. I’ve been either raiding or getting money/mats for raids pretty much all the time I’ve been on. I’d set my auctioneer to be extremely conservative when our server started receiving free transfers and forgot to change it back, so that didn’t help on the money front. (I’m still not sure why they opened our server for free transfers, we weren’t hurting for population before that.)

Today’s Questionable Content made me laugh.

Need More Rage: New PvP Gears

Till I read Ratshag’s post, I completely failed to make the connection that you can now buy a set of PvP gear from vendors. Time to run my toons around to the faction representatives. It’s not going to replace Season 1 gear, but it could give you a nice boost in earning the honor for the better PvP sets.

Helm - Thrallmar ( http://wowhead.com/?npc=17585 )
Chest - Sha’tar ( http://wowhead.com/?npc=21432 )
Shoulders - Lower City ( http://wowhead.com/?npc=21655 )
Gloves - Cenarion Expedition ( http://wowhead.com/?npc=17904 )
Legs - Keepers of Time ( http://wowhead.com/?npc=21643 )

Zen Tanking: DPS Classes (rant)
It’s way easy to not pull aggro. Watch your threat meter, give the tank a few seconds to get aggro, stop attacking if he loses aggro for any reason, and use your head.

I am amazingly pumped! Our guild alliance managed to down both Shade of Aran and Prince for the first time last night. We started our run at 9PM and managed to go through until about 1:30 AM. Kara is our oyster!

Our other tank couldn’t be there, so I was the solo tank. This gave me ample opportunities to screw up and I seized those opportunities (grin). I body pulled Curator, but we still one-shotted him. Shade went amazingly smoothly. On our first attempt at Prince, I body pulled moving into position. Our third (?) attempt was a heart-breaking wipe at 1%. Our fourth attempt was picture perfect - not one death.

I am very lucky to be running with such a good group. We have had no loot drama, no drama on who gets to raid and who doesn’t, and everyone performs their roles with panache.

This post: Will the Novel Die? (David Louis Edelman) seemed to tie into Cringely’s latest post. More or less it’s not a matter of the novel dying or of people not reading, it’s that with the move to electronic reading there are fewer and fewer reasons to use the medium of the novel for storytelling.

One of the stupidest features that’s lacking from the feed readers I’ve seen is the ability to search the feeds that I’m subscribed to. Sometimes I read a post, the a few days later I read another post that I want to relate to the first one. Unfortunately by I can’t remember what the first one was. What I’m trying is OPML to HTML: Parsing a list of feeds then using that list to make a Google Custom Search Engine. Now to see if actually works.

edit: It worked! I had to edit the parser a bit to add new lines after each entry but otherwise it worked beautifully.

This:

The University of Phoenix is supposedly preparing a complete middle and high school online curriculum available anywhere in the world.

looks very interesting. I wonder if it’ll be available when my kids hit that stage? Mind you the local school is pretty good so I doubt I’d pull them out, but you never know what will happen.

I, Cringely . The Pulpit . War of the Worlds | PBS

Blood Pact: Warlock tips and tricks - WOW Insider has a lot of useful warlock tips. Since Jaimie and I are playing the dot-fear-win team a little more these days, I need to brush up on my warlock skills. Mind you, I also need to clean up my warlock’s interface a lot - I’ve been delaying that while hoping for a bigger monitor soon. Two addons to look into are Align and Class Timer.

Succubus Macro

/clearfocus modifier:alt
/focus target focus,noexists ; target focus,dead
/clearfocus target focus,help
/petfollow
/cast pet:succubus,target focus,exists,harm Seduction; Seduction

PocketMod: The Free Recyclable Personal Organizer looks like it might be useful. I liked the Lifehacker suggestions.

Our guild alliance continues to make strong progress through Karazhan. This weekend we did Attumen, Maiden, and Moroes again. Then we moved on to Opera and got Romulo and Julianne. We one-shotted them. The next night we one-shotted Curator and got Shade of Aran down to 22% on our first try.

I think one of the things that contributes a lot to our success is that everyone does what they’re supposed to do. For Curator, DPS stayed focused on the flares. For Shade, no-one moved during flame wreath, everyone ran during the arcane explosions, and popped healthstones after the polymorph. It helps that our guild has a lot of raiders or former raiders. However, the people from The Train are all new to raiding and they’re doing better than 90% of the raid groups I’ve seen. We are extremely lucky to be playing with them.

I recently finished reading Robert Charles Wilson’s Spin. I received this book as one of Tor’s free promotional ebooks. This is near future science fiction. I would classify it as Big Idea science fiction - the Big Idea is the core of the book.

The premise is that at some point a few years from now, the Earth is wrapped in a bubble by mysterious aliens. Time inside the bubble passes much more slowly than time in the outside universe so that seconds on Earth are years or decades for the rest of the universe. This bubble is the the Spin. The story follows a narrator whose name eludes me and two siblings as they each react to the Spin over the course of their lives.

The previous sentence sums up my problem with this book. The ideas are grand and sweeping, but I found myself totally lacking in empathy for the characters. I can’t remember the narrator’s name. I’d be hard pressed to tell you much about any of the characters or what exactly they did. I reached the end of this book more or less thinking “So what?” This book is a beautiful setup for a sequel of some kind, but I really don’t care.

I would not recommend this book to anyone. There are better stories out there for science fiction and better speculations out there for science fact.

This is the kind of setup I’d like to get eventuallyfor my computer: Burn 600 Calories a Day Typing. I’m likely going to work towards it in increments. My next step is going to be a standing desk - I hope to build that this summer. Then we’ll see how I like it.

Here’s a list of pre-kara bear tanking gear. Now to get my poor little druid up to 70…

Shifting Perspectives: Bear Tanking Strategies Part 2 - WOW Insider

There are lots of very nice pieces of leather gear that have high armor values, and with the Dire Bear multiplier, you can climb to over 20,000 armor very quickly prior to running any 5 man instance content at all.

In fact, let s take a quick look at a common set of pre-Karazhan leather gear, gear that can be obtained without Heroics, or even instances except for a single Arcatraz run , gear appropriate for bear tanking, and see where it gets us.

* Braxxis Staff of Slumber - 550 armor
* Stylin Purple Hat - 232 armor
* The Dreamer s Shoulderpads - 187 armor
* Cloak of the Valiant Defender - 262 armor
* Heavy Clefthoof Vest - 500 armor
* Umberhowl s Collar - 281 armor
* Verdant Gloves - 393 armor
* Manimal s Cinch - 348 armor
* Heavy Clefthoof Leggings - 503 armor
* Heavy Clefthoof Boots - 394 armor
* Mark of Tyranny - 180 armor
* Badge of Tenacity - 308 armor

This gives us a total of 4,138 armor. Multiply that by the Dire Bear form multiplier, and we have 20,690 armor.

I don’t actually have a level 70 rogue. My highest rogue is 42, Alliance, on a PvP server, and has been parked for many months. However, I do run Kara with one rogue in our raid and one of our guildies has an up and coming rogue alt. This Pre-Karazhan Gear list for rogues could be useful to them. So could A Rogue’s Guide to Karazhan.

Here are stat weights for 2.4 for Holy priests. Should I ever decide to reroll a holy priest, these values will doubtless have changed before I hit 70 (or 80). By the way, if you want a quick way to check these values in-game without using a calculator, the Pawn addon can quickly give you this calculation.

Weighing Healing Stats in Patch 2.4 « A Dwarf Priest

Here are our final stat weights:

Low Raid Priest (T4ish Content):

0.61 spirit /0.52 int / 0.2 stam / 1 mp5
0.19 heal / 0.06 spell crit / 0.02 spell haste

Mid-Raid Priest (T5ish Content):

0.63 spirit /0.51 int / 0.18 stam / 1 mp5
0.19 heal / 0.06 spell crit / 0.03 spell haste

High-Raid Priest (T6ish Content):

0.67 spirit /0.52 int / 0.15 stam / 1 mp5
0.19 heal / 0.06 spell crit / 0.05 spell haste

Note: Human priests should multiply the spirit weight by 1.05 due to their racial bonus (0.64 for low; 0.66 for mid; 0.70 for high).

I liked this quote from Return of the weasel: Guild selection, Part 1 - WOW Insider.

Guilds that fall under the appellation of “casual” could literally be doing anything on a given night from farming Illidan to trying to get past Mr. Smite (”wtf he keeps improvising”).

A good statement of how valueless the label Casual is as a descriptor.

I spent all afternoon Saturday getting a replacement tank attuned for Karazhan. Shadow Labs, the first bit of Steamvault, the first boss of Arcatraz, Old Hillsbrad, and Black Morass gave me a chance to practice paladin healing. It went pretty well. We only had one wipe that was my fault - I sat to drink too long in Black Morass and missed healing the tank. I managed to get my hunter pulled in for the actual grabbing of the key fragments, so now she’s only an Old Hillsbrad and Black Morass run away from being Kara attuned as well (not that she’s anywhere near geared for Kara).

We did a run at Maiden Saturday night, but with only two healers it didn’t go so well. No problems with the trash, but we wiped and rewiped on Maiden all evening. It was mostly my fault - I missed getting blessing of sacrifice up and with our tanks just Kara geared they couldn’t take the hits with both healers stunned.

We went back Sunday night and it was just beautiful. On one of our early trash pulls all healers/rezzers died so we had to run back in and we wiped the first time on Maiden with her at 50%. After that we were on our game and took Maiden down beautifully. Then we wandered over to Moroes and nuked him - no deaths, cc was only broken when the assigned person did it, it was slick. It’s amazing the difference three dedicated healers makes. The downside is that I’m not tanking. The upside is that I really like the people I’m running with so that makes it worthwhile.

Evan managed to unlock a map tonight in Mario Kart Double Dash. You have never seen a more excited bunch of kids.

We’d bought a Gamecube about a year ago, but the kids didn’t play it much. We pull it out when cabin fever starts to overwhelm the kids. It’s good to see that it’s being enjoyed.

Get smart with these educational sites - Download Squad has three educational game sites described. They sound as though they’d be of interest to my kids - I’ll have them check out the sites and see.