The Farstrider Scout

There’s a new thing in town, pulling all of us WoW bloggers in to form a closer community:  Blog Azeroth.  Quite a few people have mentioned it on their blogs already, and it seems to be growing at an exponential rate.  I’ll likely be lurking around there and pulling ideas for posts for here.

Things are going wonky at work, once again, but this time it’s a bit worse.  We’ve gone to 12+ hour shifts, meaning my schedule now consists of work, sleep, and that’s about it.  Next week, I’ll be going to a different shift before being sent to Florida for a few weeks.  As a result of this, my posting will likely be sporadic.  I’ll post when I can though.

So… BRK and a host of other blogs have been blocked here at work…  And I’m sure my site will be on the chopping block soon as well, so this will probably be the last one I do here, since my email is tied in with it as well…

Anyhow, this week’s Arena review…  3 wins, 8 losses.  We learned a lot though.  Saturday, we didn’t do any matches, but I took Sheru outside Orgrimmar and we duelled for an hour or so.  I started out melee only, no traps, then upgraded to traps, then bow, then full out using everything I had at my disposal.  I did my best  to teach her as much as I could about taking down hunters, and to a lesser extent, other classes.  She’s very new to PvP, with only 2k honor kills on her main, whereas, I’ve got 13k+, ranked 9th Horde-side on my server… And I’ve still got a lot to learn.  She doesn’t have her PvP trinket either, so we’re going to work on getting that for her as well.  Sunday we did 6 matches together, going 3 and 3 before calling it quits.

Athanaric joined me for the last 5 matches, and we were beaten every time.  The last match was entertaining though, facing off against two players from Alliance side that we were very familiar with, and had fought outside of Arena before.  In the end, it was down to hunter against hunter, and she won out thanks to me being OOM.  Good fight, Kalili.

The big disadvantage to having to cycle schedules from nights to days and back again in the same weekend is that it leaves you rather drained.  Right now, I’m about to faceplant on my keyboard, but I need to stay up for just a little bit longer.

The bear has a name!  Bejek is now 61, slowly on his way to becoming the tanking pet that I want him to be.  Spent a good chunk of time in Nagrand earlier today just slaughtering talbuk and clefthoof left and right while a guild mate skinned everything we dropped.  It would have been a shame to let all that go to waste.

Sheru and I also knocked 6 arena matches out, coming away with 3 wins and 3 losses….  Would have been 3 and 2, but I had to push our luck and we went up against a warrior/rogue combo and made mistakes that we shouldn’t have.

Hit revered with Cenarion Expedition today as well, and now the head enchant (will link tomorrow) is mine!  All mine!  I’m now sitting at 85 hit, which if I recall is very close to the cap.  Still need to work on the agility though.

In any case, I’m out of steam…  At least I’ll sleep well.

I really dislike working weekend duty, as it screws up my sleep schedule.  Fortunately, I get Friday and Monday off, since I’m working both days, and it only happens about once every 6-9 weeks, depending on manning.

But the real issue with “the Duty” as we call it, arise when something comes up that the production superintendant, or “pro-super”, the man running the show, is unable to handle, because all he does is work the duty, and never experiences what happens during the rest of the week.  As a result, he has to call up the lead pro-super, who’s probably at home enjoying a beer, and really doesn’t want to be bothered…

And in the end, we all end up going home much later than originally intended.  Yay.

There was more of a story to this, but I’ve lost all inclination to write it.

Yesterday’s daily BG was for Warsong Gulch, and the beginning of Warsong Weekend, so it’s only natural that I played at least one match… Which ended up being more enjoyable than any other time I’ve been in the Gulch recently.

The first match ended up being the “least stressful WSG evar” for me, due to the fact that once I got into the match, I quickly discovered two things.  One, the Alliance flag was gone.  Two, this match had been going on for ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY MINUTES.    Now, I’ve experienced this particular bug before, and usually all it takes is 20 tickets being opened (Ok, maybe not that many.) and a GM shows up and resets the flag.  So, tickets are opened, and we proceed to farm honor kills after getting everyone to understand that there’s no flag to cap.  By this point, Vree is long dead, taken out by a stupid warlock, but I don’t feel like rezzing her, figuring I’ll die soon anyway.  Half an hour later, a GM shows up to reset the flags, and I spend all but the last 10 minutes of the match petless… But still rocking everyone’s world. 

Next up, Rintara, my wife’s new shaman, needs a [Scout's Tabard], so I hop on Drekoran so we can do the required Arathi Basin and Warsong Gulch matches, and holy crap melee is different.  I’ve never played melee in WoW PvP before – none of my characters made it far enough – and PvE as melee is simple, you just sit there and beat on them.  Not so with this, unless you’re facing off against a hunter that doesn’t know any better.  I eventually came to the conclusion, despite winning both matches, that I need better gear if I’m going to continue PvPing.  Rintara, on the other hand, has everything she wants, and will be fast-tracking it to Outland with her new guide.  She’ll probably hit 40 by the end of the weekend, knowing her.

Later on we started putting together a premade, and started using Ventrilo.  I’ll say this for voice comms – it makes coordinating and calling targets a lot easier.  The first match, with only 5, went well enough, and the next match, running with a full group of 10 was awesome.  Another hunter and myself held down their flag room for the first cap before being wiped out by a warrior/rogue combo.  After that, I was mostly on defense, calling out incoming targets and stopping people in their tracks as they came up the ramp, usually one at a time.  I’m sure I pissed quite a few melee people off with my Wyvern Sting -> Rocket Launcher -> Aimed Shot -> Scorpid Sting (to cleanse Wyvern Sting) -> Freeze Trap -> Aimed Shot -> Scatter Shot -> Dead combo, as I started getting singled out… But as long as their flag carrier was dead, I didn’t care.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t meant to last, as the next match found us 3 people short, who got replaced by someone from another server, and pitting us against a premade from Farstriders, so we lost, and people started heading to bed.

Overall, though I’m definitely liking my new spec for sheer stopping power.  While I can’t neccessarily kill people faster until I start critting, they can’t do much when they’re immobilized.

With very little going on in WoW, at least of significance, I decided to spend my “blog time” making small changes to the site.  I all the items over to one sidebar so that things look a little less cluttered.  As soon as I figure out how to remove the now empty sidebar I will.  I’d also like to figure out a way to have the number of posts shown be lowered so that it’s not trying to display so much on one page.  If anyone has any clue on how this might be done, I’m open to suggestions.  If I can get that done, maybe I’ll start adding things on the bottom bar, but right now it’s too much of a pain to scroll down through all the previous posts.

I threw a site-meter on the bottom bar as well.  I would have preferred one that doesn’t show up, but I don’t feel like paying for something that unimportant.  Why a site-meter?  First off, I have no idea if this site gets any traffic at all, beyond my wife and Sellia.  The tools embedded into the site management panel (for the site as a whole, not the Wordpress portion) don’t really do a good job of showing what is getting traffic and what is not.

Lastly, considering all the gold spamming blogs have been receiving lately, I’ve decided to leave comment moderation on.  It’s probably not a big issue, seeing as I’ve only had 10 comments for some 60 odd posts, but better safe than sorry.

While this isn’t exactly WoW specific, it occurs to me in every single PvP type game that I’ve ever played, be it WoW, Planetside, DAoC, CoD4, etc.  I’m sure that many other people experience it too – that heart-pumping, wired feeling that can cause you to flail helplessly at your keyboard, using all the wrong skills – or to smear the other player all over the wall behind them.

I know my wife is familiar with this, from both viewpoints.  When I go into this mode, I am unapprochable, and I will remain so for several minutes after the encounter is over.  Should anyone try to approach me, as she can tell you, I am short-tempered and irritable…  And if I die because you broke my concentration?  Oh, it’s on like Donkey-Kong.

She doesn’t like to experience it, or have to deal with me when I’m going through it.  Personally, I rather like it, because if I win, it ends up being very exhilarating, and even if I don’t, it’s a “high”, though I really, really, really don’t like being bothered at that time. 

There’s a problem with this mentality though, as I’m sure that you can see the trend developing here.  It puts stress on our relationship, she gets mad at me, because I get mad at her, all for getting me killed… in a GAME.

So the question is how to deal with this, short of not doing those things that cause this reaction?  And for that matter, is there anyone else out here that experiences this similar to the way I do, or am I unique in this?

Final arena results for this week were 3 wins, 7 losses, which is a big improvement over last week’s 1 win, 9 losses.  Sheru helped win one of them, after we changed our strategy up, and Ath helped me knock out the last six matches last night, with two wins added. 

Part of that I think I can attribute to the new spec.  Having the added CC of Wyvern Sting really helped shut people down.  I still need to boost my agility up, but I don’t think I’ll see that until I start going to BG’s again regularly.  Another benefit is the increased health – with all my pvp gear worn, I had just under 10k health…  The day prior, coming out of Kara raid buffed, I had 11.2k health when I put all the PvP gear on.

Overall, the paperdoll DPS loss seems negligable, as I crit a lot more, which has been pulling aggro from my pet, and in one run through Crypts, I managed to push out 536 DPS, which is high for me.   Sooo, I think I’ll be sticking with this spec for a while.

Drekoran Grimtotem looked out from the shadows of Murder Row, his yellow eyes shifting from side to side, watching each passerby carefully.  His ears picked up the clip-clopping of horse hooves, and he drew further back into the shadows, his black hair and armor blending in slightly.

But it was not enough.  The horse drew to a stop in front of him, Champion Vranesh mounted atop, and flanked by two city guards.  “Well, well, well, what do we have here?”  Vranesh sneered.  “A Tauren rogue?  Who ever heard of such a thing!?”  The faces of the guards were stoic, unmoving…  The Blood Knight dismounted and approached Drekoran slowly.  The yellow eyes shifted quickly from side to side, and then Varesh reached out quickly, snatching a pouch from the large Tauren before him.  The pouch tore open, scattering small leaves everywhere, and Varesh’s eyes widened.  “Bloodthistle, eh!?”  The Blood Knight turned to signal the guards standing by his horse.  “Sieze hi-…!”

He was too slow – a black mass of solid muscle suddenly moved, bowling Champion Vranesh over.  There was a loud roar, the whinny of a horse, and a clatter of armor as the guards too were knocked over.  Vranesh was back on his feet, yelling “Stop that Tauren!!! BEAR!!! Whatever!”  Sprinting after the fleeing druid, he turned the corner to see an empty street.

Drekoran watched the Blood Knight fume from the shadows of a bench in the form of a large cat, his skin shivering in excitement as the last traces of adrenaline coursed through his body.  Obtaining the weed would be more difficult now, as he would no longer be welcome in Silvermoon for sure…  And selling it was another matter all together.  But it would happen, oh yes, it would happen.

The thistle must flow.

Apparently I spend too much time playing WoW…  This can be evidenced by the fact that I’m having trouble keeping up with this blog, among other things.  And its odd too, because I’m both enjoying the game, and not enjoying it at the same time.  I’ve also got a billion things to write, one of which is another short story, so that’s going to come next – meaning this will be short.

Getting groups together over the past 2 weeks or so has been like pulling teeth.  I think people are starting to get tired of the same old, same old, and are ready for new content… Content which consequently won’t be out for another two months at the very least.  The guild has managed to get a few instance runs going though, and last night I thought I had lucked out:  I got a group to Kara.

Needless to say, as a PUG, we didn’t get past Moroes.  By the time we had wiped four or five times, the trash mobs had started respawning, the main tank was falling asleep, and so we decided to call it quits.  I came out a few gold richer though, thanks to a quest turn in, and all the money that dropped from the trash mobs that we killed….  And I learned an important lesson: Going to Kara with a PUG is rough.