Joel’s Scattered Thoughts

I felt like reading a David & Leigh Eddings book today, so I started rereading The Redemption of Althalus.  For me this is the archetypical Eddings book.  The plot, characters, and dialogue are pretty much the same as in any other Eddings book with the names changed and the serial numbers filed off.  The biggest difference is that is is a single book rather than a trilogy.  By reading this book you can judge if the rest of Eddings’ work will appeal to you. 

As usual for the Eddings, the characters gradually discover that the universe is on a tipping point balance between the paths of two gods.  One god stands for chaos and the other for order.  The hero begins ignorant of this cosmic struggle and over the course of the book finds out about the conflict, assembles a group to help him, and makes the choices to tip the balance to the side of good.  The story is light and humorous and worth reading for the fun of it.  Don’t expect anything particularly exciting - this a popcorn book, not a deep existential experience that you’ll think about for years to come. 

A Dwarf Priest has a very detailed writeup on Weighing Priest Healing Stats for Wrath. I’ve pulled out some bottom line numbers but the whole thing is worth a read (also he provides links to Lootrank profiles).

T7 Content

• Spellpower: 2100
• OOFSR MP5: 450
• Spirit: 950
• Int: 950
• Crit: 20%
• Haste: 7%

Deep Holy Priest Stat Weights (w/Spiritual Healing, Spiritual Guidance, IHC, Serendipity, Test of Faith, Empowered Healing, Circle of Healing)

• Spellpower: 0.60
• Spirit: 0.54
• Intellect: 0.74
• Crit: 0.10
• Haste: 0.45
• MP5: 1.00

Deep Disc Priest Stat Weights (w/Mental Agility, Mental Strength, Rapture, Borrowed Time, Divine Aegis, Penance)

• Spellpower: 0.60
• Spirit: 0.40
• Intellect: 0.84
• Crit: 0.08
• Haste: 0.48
• MP5: 1.00

EDIT: Shadowpriest Stats

For Shadowpriests, see Shadowpriest.com
An imaginary stat “PP” for Pseudopower is used to calculate item values.

• 1 spellpower = 1 PP
• 1 crit rating = 0.77 PP
• 1 haste = 0.79 PP
• 1 spirit = 0.23 PP
• 1 int = 0.39 PP
• 1 hit = 1.41 PP (when not hit-capped)
• spellpower + crit*0.77 + int*0.39 + spirit*0.23 + haste*0.79 + hit*1.41 + sockets + meta [CSD] = total PP

The Ferrett pointed out this article on two very different attitudes about sex currently active in the United States: Red Sex, Blue Sex. This is something that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. Sadly, I have not reached any profound conclusions. I’ve already started telling my kids about sex via The Cartoon Guide to Sex and not dodging the issue when it comes up. I’ve made sure to emphasize that having a child is a huge responsibility and that contraceptives are a necessary option if you’re not up raising a child yet. I’ve also made sure that they know that contraceptives can fail. The reason that I tell them all this resonates with what’s described as a liberal attitude in the article - I want my kids to live the lives they choose, not fall into child-rearing by default and come to resent it later.

I don’t have much to add to this Things Every Warrior Tank Thinks Every Non-Tank Should Know. Mostly I’m making a note of it for when we get back into raiding again in Wrath and a new raider joins us.

RivaTuner Scales Your Graphics Card for 2D/3D Efficiency might be worth trying out to increase my framerates when gaming.

We ran the first part of Kara pretty much spontaneously last night.  There were four druids itching to tank the place and we only had one healer, so I decided to respec my shaman resto and help heal.  This is the first time I heal anything on my shaman and it went pretty well.

I was woefully unprepared, but with the way they’ve nerfed Kara it really didn’t matter.  I grabbed a spec off of WoWWikki and pulled my gear with the highest spellpower out of the bank.   Any spells that looked like they’d help out with healing were dropped onto my action bar and I spent the evening trying to figure out what to use when.  Hopefully next time I remember to consult resources such as Resto Shaman vs. Karazhan - a Healing Guide.

A lot of gear dropped for me, mostly enhancement stuff.  When we started Kara we had an enhancement shaman who couldn’t stop getting resto drops, so I suppose this is to balance that out?  Due to the inordinate number of druids there were only three people who could use the axe from the holiday boss, so I got it by greed rolling.  (From what I can tell you have to be able to equip the axe for its use effect, so hopefully there wasn’t a druid who wanted to try it.) 

I don’t know if I want to go back to healing at all.  This was a heavily nerfed Kara, an instance I’ve been raid leading for months, and I still spent all my time making the bars go right.  I really didn’t see any of the fights, I just focused on standing in the right place and keeping people healed.   As a tank, I’m very aware of what’s happening around me even when I’m standing there staring into a demon’s crotch. 

As I look forward to Wrath, I’m worried about having to PvP for PvE gear again.  I still use my PvP shield for tanking on my warrior despite having cleared Kara many, many times and having done a good chunk of ZA.  I’m bored with PvP and I really don’t plan on doing much of it come the expansion.  No incoming dramatic protest, I’ll just live with having sub-optimal gear if the optimal gear requires PvP to acquire.  If PvP becomes fun for me again, I’ll do it then. 

Steady shot had a post a while back on Choosing your pets for WOTLK. My hunter is probably going to stick with her cat. She’s had it since level 10 and I’m attached to it. The other option is the bear she tamed from Winterspring, but I haven’t really played with that yet. I’m not terribly excited about any of the exotic pets I’ve seen so far - we’ll see what happens when she gets to level cap.

Tobold talks about Games giving feedback. I would certainly like it if WoW had a better feedback mechanism. One of the things I find most difficult as a raid leader is tracking exactly where things went wrong. It’s not terribly skilled of me, but I’d like to have a quick way of seeing things such as “Pete had the holy fire debuff for 15 seconds then died”, “Cube number 4 was not clicked”, or “Sam pulled aggro”. Tobold’s idea of a replay tool is terrific, but maybe that all I need is a quick way of reviewing the combat log in game. Now to see if I can do something with invisible chat frames and such…

My shaman hit 70 today!  I started any number of shaman and didn’t get them up very high.  It’s a good feeling to finally get one up to 70.  I’m not sure if I’ll play him much between now and the expansion, but it’s been a fun trip. 

Computer Chair Buying Guide A Step-By-Step Guide looks good. I’m going to need to get a new chair soon.

(via Lifehacker)

As Wrath approaches, I need to pick a good name for my death knight.  I have a lovely name picked out, but it has accents for every other letter.  Alternately I’ve taken the name of the Green Knight to match with my vaguely Arthurian naming scheme for my toons on this server.  My bank toons are named after politicians, so I’m surprised I have any money left. 

I have to agree with The Egotistical Priest’s What Ego’s Most Excited About in Wrath. 10 player raids for all content really appeals to me. I don’t like 25 player raids as that’s just too many people. I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up running some 25s in Wrath, but I’m hoping there won’t be too many.

I’m making progress on my push ups. I’m up to 31 now. Only 69 to go!

Now the reverse QQ about the zombie event is coming out on many blogs. This amuses me as well. “How dare people not enjoy the things I did! They should suck it up and enjoy it anyway!” Cue The Four Yorkshiremen

Starman makes some good points on the use of
Stats: Devil or Angel?. We always post WoW Web Stats for our raids. We have some new raiders joining us, so I need to make sure to emphasize the use of stats as a teaching tool rather than simply a race to the biggest numbers.

Techdirt asks Should Proprietary Software Companies Be More Concerned About Open Source Or Piracy? His argument is that every pirated copy of a popular program means that someone is not using the open source alternative.

I think it’s a good point. I’m using a lot of open source solutions at work because I don’t want to pirate anything. Hence the reason DRM really ticks me off - I’ve paid for the software when I could have gotten it for free, I get punished and the pirates get an improved product?

As part of my work, I sometime need to layout a couple of pages of photos and annotate them. I had been using Microsoft Word to do this because it’s what we use to write up reports. Unfortunately this gave me huge, easily corrupted Word files with little fine grain control.

I switched to Scribus for the last couple projects and the difference is amazing! The files are tiny, the load time is speedy, and I can actually put notations where I want them rather than just in the right general area.

I’m pretty much positive that Scribus is nowhere near as nice to use or as powerful as professional desktop publishing programs, but it’s powerful enough for me and it’s free. If you don’t already have a desktop publishing program and you have to make up documents that include both images and text, take a look at Scribus. My next challenge will be to see if I can layout an entire document in Scribus and have it look better than its Word counterpart.

ThinkTank has a Druid Bear FAQ for 3.02/Wrath. It’s so nice to have all this information summed up concisely, especially given that I’m new to druid tanking. Now I need to dig up something similar for druid healing.

I don’t know about the educational value of these 4 Flash Games to Help Educate Your Kids, but they might be fun. I’ll point my kids to the sites and see what they think.