Arena points ftl

Sadly, after using the new arena point calculator, it'll still be the same amount of time to get my epic crossbow whether we drop to 1300 or jump up to 1500. Crazy, huh? Not to say I'll be slacking off in any arena, but it makes me feel better about having the worst win/loss record on the team.

BTW, has anyone tried the new voice chat yet?

Bendyr は 貧乏 です。

With great drops come great expenses :/

I almost had to cry when [Gloves of Dexterous Manipulation] dropped in Kara yesterday. Sure, it was a huge improvement over my blue gloves, but TWO sockets, an enchant, and everything was already going to be a hit on my waning money supply.

Like I said before, whenever I get a certain amount of money, I start buying crap. I was up to 900 gold last week, when I decided for some reason that I needed a [Riding Crop]... Then I saw a [Relentless Earthstorm Diamond] for 100g on the auction house, which in my defense is a steal. And of course, I was buying flask mats and pots and healing potions and repair bills...

I'm down to 300g now... and tomorrow I'll have enough points for my [Merciless Gladiator's Bonecracker], which I know I should be really happy about, but all I can think about it how much those Mongoose mats are going to set me back...

If anyone needs me, I'll be at the Orgrimmar Blood Bank.

Fel mana potions...

So the FelManaPots are not ftw, nor are they ftl. I've found out that indeed, they do not affect my Mend Pet, and the loss of damage on Arcane shot is fairly minimal. Indeed, it seems to be a good fit if you're a hunter going against someone and you know you're gonna run out of mana...like being overhealed, but only with mana.

It does, however, affect your global potion cooldown, so once you pop a FMP, you have to wait the usual cooldown if you wanna down a Super Mana Potion. FMP gives you more, but it's not all at once. So it's very conditionally cool, depending on the circumstances.

I also spent a crapload of my honor to get these lovely little boots, which I makes me feel more uber than before.


Other than that, I'm still holding out in Arena points for my XBow, and I can never (probably due to my strange student schedule) find a group to do the last Ogrila prereq I need or the crazy boss grind to get up to summoning Terokk. Alas, someday the epic flying mount shall be mine...

Stealthing IRL

I often begrudge the fact that we didn't have cool technology like the internet, iPods, and what have you growing up. However, when I see videos like this I'm a little relieved, because... this would totally have been me 12 years ago, had Warcraft and YouTube been available.

Fel Mana Potions for Cowchan?

I never really got the point of the "Fel" potions. The one for HP seemed like too big of a tradeoff for a dpser like myself, so I never got it. The Fel Mana Potion restores a ton of mana, but reduces spell dmg and +healing for 15 minutes. However, a really interesting thread on wowinsider pointed out that there's pretty much no downside for hunters using the Fel Mana Potion.

Most of the hunter's shots are barely affected by spell dmg anyway, and the -healing effect doesn't even affect Mend Pet! You basically get 2 mana pots on separate cooldown timers with pretty much no downside...

OP!

Battling the heat

So you guys have been subject to my terrible video card's heat issues. On the bright side I think I may have found the problem -- for some reason or other, the power I was supplying to my new heat sink's fan was no good. I went back to pluggin the fan into a separate computer's mobo and my card has been acting a helluva lot better.

Here's what I've been goin thru... [click for full size versions]


nut so great.

bendyr saves my ass.

not a good way to start a match...

doh!

kotonoha has evolved to chocobo knight!

woo! finally hit 40 with another character on this server. kotonoha has been birded.



the gut ripper is equipped.

eat dagger alliance bitches!

With great ubers comes great responsibility

So I decided to try out a few Kara runs with a friend's raiding guild. Things were pretty tough the first day, but the second day I got the hang of it a little more and I even topped the dps charts on The Curator! I was rewarded for my efforts with [Garona's Signet Ring]



So, it's been pretty fun, and the guild I ran with was kind of in a good phase for me to get in; they've run Kara a few times, but they're still gearing up for the bigger raids, so they're cool with me not really being familiar with the encounters yet. I've decided I'm going to join up with them for the time being and see where that goes.

In the meantime, I've passed the mantle of guild leadership onto Meef. I'll still be around and available for 2v2 arenas (with better gear even), so make sure to free up a slot on your Friends List for me.

P.S. Oh, and since you're going to find out in-game anyway, my new guild's name is "Team Ramrod"... Please don't /point or /lol next time you run into me in Org...

P.P.S. My decision to drop Mutilate was totally validated by the Kara run too. Sooo many poison immune mobs and fights where I can't choose my position would have made me a sad Panda. A sad Panda with DPS below the tank, more than likely.

A dangerous new meme...

Bel airing, Rickrolling, and facepalming are suddenly too on-the-nose... Is the new forum meme going to be South Carolining?

I personaly believe that the reason most combat rogues do not take blade twisting is because some rogues don't have weapons. I believe that these weapons such as warlock and the druid such as and I think the dagger rogues in wow should help the warlocks and the such as druids so we will be able to build up a better rogue comunnity.

Thank you for your candor.

A change of plans

So I got my Main Hand Arena weapon! I also respec'd Combat Maces, which is a more PVP oriented spec, since i'm not instancing as much as I used to. Hopefully this will work out better!

Uh, what should I do, guys?

So I've been planning on going towards 5/5 Beast Lord as we slowly rack up Arena points, but if I buy something soon, I'd say I'd get [Merciless Gladiator's Chain Gauntlets]

since they give the Multi-shot boost, and also since out of the three pieces of BL set, the gloves drop in SH, and I hate doing SH, while I actually like doing SV (where Kalithresh drops the other 2). So, that's if I wanna drop the points now.

But I'm also ignorant of all sorts of WoW stuff, including Arena ish. So assuming I get to carry my points over from S2 to S3, and assuming that there's a drop in price of S2 gear, and since there aren't a whole lot of weapon upgrades I can get from non-raid instances, I'd say maybe I'd save up and go for [Merciless Gladiator's Crossbow of the Phoenix]

So whadda you guys think?

merciless shield wall

gyohoho!



[Merciless Gladiator's Shield Wall]

it is mine! now i just need an chant... think ima go for more shield block value for kicks...

i can now crit for ~1k with shield slam! gyohohohoho

Arena musings...

The ROFL went 5-5 again this week, which makes me think we've hit a kind of equilibrium around 1350. This may be about as well as we can expect to do until we get some better gear, or maybe touch up our spec's a bit. That being said, the points from this week should put me at about 2500 something, so I'm definitely going to get my [Merciless Gladiator's Shanker] next week, which should definitely make me a little more dangerous.

However, after reading all these people qqing about warlocks in arenas on the forum, I have to wonder if we're a weird group, or if 2v2 is just that different. I don't really think Warlocks give us that much grief. As we usually single them out as our primary targets, and they're cloth, we usually take them out before they can get a full dot rotation off (not counting those crazy tier 6 epix warlocks we somehow get matched with on occasion). As a rule, I think my "most hated" classes in our 2v2 games are:

1. Paladins


2. Hunters


3. Mages

I wish that the arena would give us some breakdowns of the teams that we've lost against and their class makeups. Maybe I'll start jotting these down myself...

Wot, no Arena Points?

So I'm flying to London today for work! I'll be there and in Edinburgh until next Sunday. Meef and I already got in our 5 games, so Cow, try to sync up with Meef and get the rest of the 10 games in before Tuesday. I am bringing my laptop to london, but i dunno how much I'll get to play, but in either case I'll be back next Sunday to get in my minimum 3 games for the following week. Woot!

QQ

The word on the street is that Season 3 weapons will actually require a specific arena rating to purchase (the number being thrown around is 1900). This was supposedly confirmed at blizzcon, but I haven't found a blue post to back it up... Still, it seems like it's happening.

Oh well, I guess now I don't have to agonize over whether or not to purchase the s2 dagger this late in the season.

UPDATE: Here's the exact quote from the wowinsider blizzcon transcript:

4:33pm: Because weapons aren't as distingushed against raid gear (players were raiding, and just doing arenas for the weapons), there's going to be a rating requirement to buy a weapon-- can't just save points, have to do well to get the weapon.

Argh, I feel like this punishes melee classes more than casters. For casters, weapons are really just glorified armor pieces. For melee classes, the arena weps are a significant dps boost over anything else that's accessible without raiding.

/tar Other Blog; /cast Pickpocket; /cast Vanish

So, I was browsing some other wow blogs at work, and I saw this blogspot had javascript and css that was pretty cool for having mouseoverable wowhead links. I thought I'd use my crazy Rogue skills and ninja the code, so here we go:

[Stealther's Helmet of Second Sight]

[Merciless Gladiator's Shanker]

Hoping this works, if you want to include wow-links like this in the future, use this code:

<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/?item=31109" class="rare" onmouseover="showWowitem(event,31109);" onmouseout="hideWowitem();">[Stealther's Helmet of Second Sight]</a>

<a href="http://www.wowhead.com/?item=32044" class="epic" onmouseover="showWowitem(event,32044);" onmouseout="hideWowitem();"">[Merciless Gladiator's Shanker]</a>

Plug in a new link, item number, name, and class, and it should work!

And the award for "most improved" goes to...

Chicken and ROFLs! We got a very respectable 7-3 record this week, pulling our rating up to 1401! That should net us a clean 236 points this week, which will put me with 1000 points of my uber daggerness!

Gentlemen, i think we're getting better at this... or they're getting worse.

grack

well, so just some crap fyi

1) i've been in a seminar thing in sf all week so my schedule is all crap and don't really have much internet access during the day -_-
2) going home this weekend and next weekend since my sister got into davis med school and i need to get my dad's truck back.
3) epic mount roxxors and totally kicks ass for quests... of course... now i'm almost out of quests (well, prolly still 1-3 more weeks of netherstorm at my current rate). still, for dailies it just makes them that much faster.
4) netherdrake quests suck big ass.
5) got an awesome tenacious earthstorm diamond for my helm from the steamvaults completion quest

5) now that my income has been freed up, lemme know what kinda crap ya need. tomes, signets, diamonds, pots, etc.
6) should i get a gut ripper for kotonoha? eeeehehehehe

new rides

at long last.....

epicccccc mouuuuuuuuuuuunnnnnnnnnnnnnttttttttttttttttttttttt!!!!!!!!!!!!


and another new mount...


much gold and real money ;_;

time to farm...

Improvements of all kinds

After going 0-10 our first week, we got a 5-5 record for the week! BBQ FTW!


In PVE news, I finally got exalted with the Keepers of time, leading to this epic dagger! I had to drop all my gold to get Mongoose, but it is worth it, non? Don't ask about the glow, though...