Needs More Salt

The Black Box.

2012-01-28T11:12:00.000-08:00

I can get into a good mystery. I make a really good sleuth; a crime is committed, various parties come and go into the situation, and someone has to come into the crime scene and sort out all the clues and piece together the truth, and what happened. It’s like putting together a plane crash after all the dust has settled and the black box is recovered.

Mysteries are good fun, simple ones at least. Sadly nothing is ever very simple; even more frustrating is when the mystery is your life and through all the sleuthing and deducting you come to the conclusion that the crime cannot be solved. The last year has been a crime scene where I have picked every nit and examined every piece of burning wreckage that was my relationship with Erin.

I came to the conclusion last year that I will never get closure from that relationship, and that only one person who could tell me the truth is the one person whom I had written off and someone whom I could not trust. Even now, I debate with myself if I asked her to tell me the truth, would I be able to trust its validity.

This didn’t sit well with me, nor will it ever. I needed to know what happened. I was consumed by the absence of that knowledge. Honestly I have been obsessing over that for longer than I want to admit to myself, some of it while the relationship was still intact.

Putting on my detective’s hat for a second, here is what I have pieced together what happened with little clues I have to work with. Erin cheated on me about halfway through our relationship, and covered it up and lied to my face that she loved me and needed to slow down the relationship. We got back together, got engaged, but she was still seeing her suitor on the side. The situation eventually exploded and the other man presented himself and I chose to believe her over his word. Things oscillated between better and worse while our sex life was on life support.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was one of her high school students. I have a picture from her journal where she curses me for wanting to improve our sex life, and on the same page claim that she had fallen for one of her students. Couple this with an uncommon amount of time she spent with him, hundreds of texts between them, and that she flat out did not come home one night from a student study session. I started to think that I picked the wrong horse when her previous fuck buddy came out of the closet.

But what to do? I was at an impasse with myself; the worst rock and hard place that I have ever had to be between in my whole life. I think Captain Ahab and I would be fast friends and have a good time over beers.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was not only breaking up with a girl, but I was also breaking up with an idea. My view of the world has changed since then, not by choice but by necessity. I’ve realized that my view of the world pre Erin was extremely idolized. I pretended to live in a world where nobody cheated on their partners, where honesty is the best policy, and where people treated each other with respect. If you don’t believe me, go read the news. It’s okay, I’ll wait.

The end of my relationship with Erin was also the end of my innocence.

That sounds really dramatic and hyperbolic, but it’s the way I feel. I don’t look at people the same way as I used to. Everyone I meet is a just another liar, cheater, or just in general bad until I get to know them. The world has shown its true face, and that presentation process has been painful, but educational.

In and ironic twist, I empathize and feel a strong connection with her mother, whom she has been a shoulder to lean on through the hard times during the relationship, and after I discovered that she was married and pregnant a little over a year after we broke up. Gretchen and I are somewhat casualties of infidelity. I’m also curious how much or how little her mother knows about what really happened.

She emailed me last year, and I have considered responding. It was short, sorry, and probably made her feel really good about herself for sending it. It ended with the mother of all cop outs:

“I honestly am sorry about how things ended with us, and I sincerely hope that you find the happiness you deserve.”

Sorry doesn’t even begin to make up for what she did. No admission of wrongdoing, and just a hollow apology in a pithy little statement. Finding happiness that I deserve? I was extremely happy with our relationship until she shit all over it and stopped being honest with me and honest with herself. I want to be happy, but that is all in the past now, a past where nobody cheats, and where truth is the currency. If anything that’s the happiness I deserve and I know I will never have it. It might very well be dangled in front of my face for the rest of my life taunting me, and haunting me. I don’t think I live in that world anymore.

I’m happy with my life though, and I don’t want to make it sound like I am going to go cut myself after posting this. Like I said, my life view has changed out of necessity, not by choice. I will find a way increase my happiness over time.

Warm Bodies

2012-01-20T23:57:00.000-08:00

Talking to friends in fresh places really has a profound impact on ones thought processes.

I'm good at WoW. In fact, probably too good at the game. I could take 24 warm bodies, unskilled players, mouthbreathers, windowlickers and fartsniffers into a raid and we would be successful and get loot. Call me arrogant, but if you have played the game with me, you would agree that it is true.

Maybe that's why I feel burned out and unchallenged. I have no peers that play this game currently. I'm reminded of a quote from Big Bang Theory:

Leonard: Do you realize that if Penny wakes up there is no reasonable explanation as to why we're here.
Sheldon: I just gave you a reasonable explanation.
Leonard: No you gave me an explanation; its reasonableness will be determiend by a jury of your peers.
Sheldon: Don't be ridiculous... I have no peers.

I am the Sheldon of WoW. I make it rain.

Who.

2012-01-18T08:21:00.000-08:00

I talked with a friend recently who wondered why that more people weren't smarter in general; not that people are stupid intentionally, but don't take that marginal effort to learn or be better people. We both came from serious relationships and grasping at what kind of person we wanted to be with next.She is extremely smart, going to be a doctor in fact, but felt slightly isolated from the world by her intelligence. Even though she wanted to find someone awesome, she wouldn't compromise herself in brilliance in order to find someone she wanted to be with.

We argued, and came short on understanding what exactly she was looking for, but it got me thinking about myself.

Smart people generally are a little arrogant about how smart they are. They take solace and shelter in the fact that they are better thinking than everyone else, probably similarly to how really attractive people take refuge in their good looks. The rub is that if you are especially gifted in one area (looks, brains, personality, endowedness) that almost everyone you meet will fail to measure up in that area to you.

I compared it to a bell curve. Sure, I am smart. If I had to give it a number, I would be in the 95th percentile of people around me; there are very few people that I know who are as smart or smarter than I think I am. So, if that is the thing I value the most, then I will only be looking in a small bandwidth of people around me for smarties, not to mention other attributes that I want (physical, chemistry, emotional).

This is who I am. I'm a funny, smart, decently attractive guy who is dynamite in the sack (or so I have been told). The stars could align and I could find someone who is looking for all those things. All the things I feel about myself are all at the very tip of the bell curve. Great, but I don't think that is what people are looking for; if I want to catch the most fish, I gotta fish with the best bait. You don't want to wait for someone to perfectly match.

So I ask a question of myself.

Who do I want to be? Do I want to be less smart, but more common?

Do I shoot for the masses, where the venn diagram has the largest intersection? Tailor myself to be what the most people are looking for: a marginally smart, marginally funny, very physically attractive with nice clothes and always looking like I have something that I can offer or give them? This person can sleep with whoever they want, talk about vapid or topical stuff with anyone.

Or do I shoot for something similar to me and take the road where I already know I will be more isolated from the world. I feel my friend's pain too. I feel that I'm imbalanced, too much brain, not enough in other areas.

When a song hits it on the head.`

2012-01-12T14:12:00.000-08:00

What do you do if there comes a day when I lose my way? What will you do?
Oh I would stand by you (Word?)
Pray for you (Oh yeah?)
If it would help I’d even die for you?

Oh yeah? That’s what the last one said
Unfortunately I was mad misled
I ran on E until no more gas was left
The most I got from her was ass and bread
The trust was lost like Kanye’s fashion sense
Accidents happen when you live with the weak
But it’s not an accident when you make a conscious decision to cheat
That’s enough reason to get into beef
Throw all your spouse’s shit on the street, quit and retreat
But these are the breaks, it’s told by Kurtis Blow
So please for my sake, stay by me, this earth is cold
And I’m freezing like I’ve been laying in dirt and snow

Time is on my side.

2012-01-10T19:22:00.000-08:00

Time is so weird.

When I was working, I felt like I had partitioned my time into buckets and that things had to happen during those designated times. Work happened during work time, and I would use my off time for whatever I tagged as off time activity whether it be catching up on podcasts, playing video games, reading, or whatever else I could think of. Sleep happened whenever. That non work bucket felt like a catch all, and I was just doing stuff to pass that time that I had allocated to it. There were things that I wanted to spend my time doing more than others, but I was content with how much each bucket held and how I had decided to allocate my non-work time. There never is enough time sadly.

Now that I am unemployed I still feel like there isn't enough time, but I am getting much more accomplished and much more miserly with what I will spend it on. Things that I used to do in my non-work time seem very useless now. I will skip entire podcasts that I used to listen to beginning to end when I had a job, skip to the meat of a video game without doing all the stuff around the edges. I am reading more and working out a shitload, and actually looking forward to it. I will whip up a dervish applying for jobs, doing stuff that has been on my to-do list forever, and catching up with old shit that needs to be done. How I look at my "free" time has changed drastically, and I hope that I can keep that point of view when I finally land a whale of a job.

Working out especially has gotten a ton of attention. I'm after results, and already I can feel myself getting stronger. The goal is to lose about 50lbs by the summer. It's one that is a little out of reach, but it will be great to see how close I can get by the end of this. Lifting has been great, as a friend turned me on to a simple, effective lifting schedule. I am adding cardio stuff on as I think I can handle it, but my lower legs get really sore if I start jogging for more than a couple minutes; I had shin spints back when I played football, and I would rather not overdo it and develop them again. Researching new workouts will be the next step.

I'm tracking my diet much closer than I have in the past, and putting myself in situations where it would be hard to violate my intake rules.

I'm not sure if this is just me getting older, and valuing my time more, or if it is a paradigm shift of who I have become over the last month and last year (Seriously, fuck 2011. Complete shit show.) I don't really care too much about things outside my personal bubble. This self improvement kick has gotten in my blood, and everything that doesn't make me a better person gets cut. Some things that have taken the sidelines are even giving any thought to dating. I want to be the best me that I can be, because I have learned that however awesome I am and I know I am, my confidence sucks. I need to feel like a better person, and that will help me feel better about who I am on the outside; many people have told me and I already know I am spectacular person in my heart and mind.

Self Investment

2012-01-02T14:41:00.000-08:00

The heart of investment is putting resources into something and hoping to get a higher return that what you put in the first place. This could be time, money, affection, thought, whatever. Last year, I spent way too many of my resources for other people, and I did not get much back, or as much as I was expecting.

As I look back at my life over the last few years since I graduated with my masters degree, there has been a lot of me overextending myself and investing in others expecting a positive return on my investment. There are a lot of people whom I squandered my time and money needlessly; I was chasing expectations that seemed reasonable at the time, but in hindsight not the best use of my resources. I didn't get nothing for something per se, but I think I ended up getting much less than I wanted out of it.

The past few years, I have been a very complete person I think. Sure there were areas for self improvement, but I chose to invest in others because ultimately, my needs are met, and I want to make others happy. There is no such thing as a selfless act; by making other's lives better, it made me feel great in return. I took a lot of people to dinner, spent money and time on others, spent my downtime thinking about others and what they were doing/thinking/were they thinking about me too? One person in particular was a complete and total bust, where I got much less out of the experience than I put in.

I started thinking about this today after I started a new workout routine, enjoying things for myself, and starting to plan the next part of my life; all of this has been implemented over the last month. I thought, what if I took all that time and energy and worked on myself. Could I realize the expectations I have of myself, if I directed all that effort inward rather than into others? What is my personal ROI (Return On Investment for all you non finance people)?

Ultimately I am not a selfish person. At some point, I would get negative satisfaction by directing my energy inward. I want to be a great person, not for myself but for others; more specifically one very special person in particular whom I would very much like to find in the near future, but I can't really worry about that right now. I got my own shit to do.

My goals for the next three months:
-Eat better, and less. I have rediscovered cooking as I have more time to enjoy my own time. I make a couple good meals over a week and dine on delicious leftovers as the week progresses.
-Work out, and do work son. This goes with the first goal, lose weight, and try to be a good lookin' gentleman and not be so much of a fatty. I've always had a belly and weighed more than I should. This needs to change, for myself.
-Travel and get out of my basement more. I am planning on going to Peru for Nate's wedding, and I want to go to Hawaii and see Ty and Cyrus and experience a little of island living for a bit.
-Play some damn video games. One of the avenues I over invested in the last year was through WoW. I'm going to shift my focus from playing that game into other games that I have been wanting to check out and neglected from not having the time to diversify.
-Read/Listen to Moby Dick, and some other classics. Moby Dick seems to be an important book and is referenced so much in American media and culture. I want to discover that world for myself and get into it.

I has plan.

Attention Whores

2011-12-24T13:26:00.000-08:00

You know what grinds my gears?

This shouldn't bug me but it does. I ran into some of the more rude people I have come across in a long time at my brother's Christmas party. My little brother still hangs out with a lot of the people he went to school with from elementary through high school, and I met a few of them last night.

There was one girl in particular who was pretty stuck up and rude. I talked to her for about 5 mins about how she lived in LA, and she was a bank manager, and all about her, when she abruptly stopped the conversation and went out with her friends for a smoke. Granted yea it was a party, and people are talking and working the room but this chick was like a light switch. As soon as there was something else in the room to take her attention, she pretty much turned her back and not so much as a give a polite "Nice to meet you" or "I'll talk to you later". Even if you don't mean those things, it's still polite or nice to acknowledge that you were speaking to a person a moment ago.

This was fairly early on in the evening, so it kinda put me off on everyone else there. As the saying goes, birds of a feather...

I kinda watched everyone else from then on and I saw how much attention whoring was going on. Everyone was just saying and doing ridiculous things in order to capture the most attention from the room as possible. My favorite line of the night was "Could you feel my back pocket and see if my wallet is still there?"; while probably effective given the crowd that night, it's just a stupid line. At one point, some drunk chick dug out one of my brother's bright orange jump suits and paraded herself around and loved that all eyes were on her.

Is it just that easy to get everyone to pay attention to you? All this made me wonder, am I just not doing it right? I don't give two shits about having anyone pay attention to me, but the magnitude of everyone last night was just way off the scale. Am I just shooting myself in the foot by not being the loudest asshole in the room if there is a girl I want to impress/get to know/sleep with?

Safety Net

2011-12-21T14:00:00.000-08:00

It's been no secret to those that know me that I have been pretty unhappy at my most recent job. About 6 months ago I left a warm, comfortable, and cozy job working for Tri-State and ventured out to take job working in Boulder, CO. While the new job taught me a lot about what I want to be doing with my career, it ended up being a casualty of that lesson. The work wasn't what I wanted to ultimately be doing, and it conflicted morally of what I want the world to be like.

So, like a lot of other people in the world, I am without employment. I'm not terribly upset, but it's nice to sleep in and be a do nothing some days. Other days I get really bored without a desk or cube to inhabit. I think it is helping me though. Having no responsibilities really lets me sit back and think: where do I want to go, what do I want to be doing, and who do I want to be with. I had a couple ex attacks, but I think they stem more from being by myself for too long than actually caring much about her.

My goal is to find that place/thing within about 3 months. I probably don't want to jump at the first thing that comes along, but being too picky may backfire. 3 months seems like a good amount of time before I start dipping too hard into my savings, and plenty of time to think about what I want and who I want to be ultimately. Finding someone to spend time and sharing my life with will probably be on hold while I figure all this shit out, but I won't turn my taxi light off entirely. I have to go pimp myself professionally and personally pretty hard in the next year it seems.

Holy Paladinning in Dragon Soul

2011-12-13T09:06:00.000-08:00

So right now I am refining my play style and gearing for Dragon Soul raiding. Got the basic power auras rolling, getting some gear, but I am still in the dark in terms of what secondary stats I should be getting.

I think that paladins are moving on from spirit\haste build of the previous tiers now that we have a new toy to play with, Holy Radiance. The initial HR hit heals for a lot, but I am really underwhelmed by how much the HOT ticks heal for. Being that Dragon Soul has a ton more raid damage and fights that people are stacking up for, I don't feel bad at all leaning on my HR button for a majority of my healing.

So now I look at my secondary stats and scratch my head. I see other paladins going towards mastery, and I really want to go that path too but I feel like that would be pigeonholeing me in a really awkward place. The absorb bubbles will look good on the meters, but I'm not sure that it is actually doing much heavy lifting at all. I need to be able to figure out my "absorb efficiency" to see how much those absorbs are saving people's lives.

Mastery seems like a great stat to smooth out the healing needed by the raid, crit is awesome if you are rolling hot dice and like big numbers, and haste gets that healing our much faster. I am not sure there is a right answer since each stat complements another in some way. Crit can give you bigger mastery shields, but more unevenly. Haste lets you "crit" and "shield" more as you are casting more spells per minute. Mastery "looks" like you are healing more. It's this weird three legged stool / Triforce that makes everything complicated.

Which is good. Stacking one OP stat would be boring. =D

I think I want enough haste to GCD cap on Ultraxion. After that I think I am going to move into crit and see where that goes. Crit ultimately will make bigger heals which will beget bigger mastery absorbs. If healing gets too spikey, I can move more into mastery.

Ensidia Shot First.

2011-12-09T12:38:00.000-08:00

As far as I am concerned, this tier of raiding was over before it started. Ill gotten gear, boss exploits, and bugging out of encounters; this is all I have heard regarding T13 heroic raiding so far. The raiding community has shown just how far they are willing to go to get their name on the front page of wowprogress.com, and I think the whole community is disappointed in how guilds have conducted themselves in order to get ranked kills. While there have always been exploits and bugs, this tier just seems to amplify and bring all this to the forefront with the breadth of how much foul play is happening.

There are some guilds that are worthy of their rankings and did things the right way to get where they are, but the vast majority of guilds have gotten their hands caught in the cookie jar, or done some other dirty deeds to get their rankings up.

Hagara has some encounter breaking bugs right now that probably make the fight a ton easier. Big Crits killed her on Heroic (World 10 woot) and used a strategy involving classes that can move while casting in order to make the fight easier. I'm not sure if this is a bug or not, or the intended way of killing her on heroic, but it still stands out in my mind that the fight was cheesed somewhat; while not as blatant as other guilds (Shattering throw comes to mind.) it still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Nevertheless, our guild killed her dead before many many other heroic guilds.

Does it even matter though? The race was corrupt from the start. Many of the top world guilds were out of the race before it even started because they did things they knew were against the spirit of competition. Big Crits is currently ranked #14 in the WORLD. It's a perfect storm that benefits us greatly and spirits are sky high. Does all this diminish our acheivement? I don't know.

Raiding. Leading. Again.

2011-12-08T08:58:00.000-08:00

About a month ago, I got that itch again to start raiding. I missed it, more importantly, I missed the people that enjoy raiding. The people that make new friends constantly, tell geeky jokes, make bad sexual innuendos and double entendres. You know, fun people. Not like all those stuck up people you meet everyday in real life.

Ishraaq, our fearless Da Crew chief approached me about leading another firelands run. Something simple, something 10man, something for mains/alts/those not raiding enough. I agreed to lead it. This has now morphed into a 25man Dragon Soul run with expectations attached to it. Yikes.

Let's talk about Da Crew for a second quick. Da Crew is our "casual" raiding rank for people just not up to snuff with the standards of the main progression team, but still wanting to raid with good people. The problem is that casual is a very grey word. Back when Big Crits was formed and the guild was starting to pick up steam, there were a lot of people wanting to be a part of the guild, but did not have the time/desire to raid in a progression environment. Couple this with the fact that pugging raids on Sen'jin horde was AWEFUL, Da Crew started joining up and became a casual group of people of whom the alts of the main raiders, and the casual folk could play and have a good time getting some phat purps.

Now, in my opinion, looking from my ivory tower of progression raid leader was that Da Crew never really found it's place in the guild. Was it a place for just the raider rejects? Was it a place where more social raiders could have a place to be? Was it a place where raider alts could come and snatch gear from mains? Are Da Crew raiders just in fact second class guild members and second class raiders? At one point or another, all the above could be true. This has always been a struggle for the people who wear "Da Crew" label.

I am interested in having more nights free than more nights raiding, because I will be unemployed shortly, and I would like to have some time to establish myself wherever I end up next year (Spoiler, I am moving out of Colorado). I am also single, which I need time to date and meet new people when the time comes.

So in coming back to raiding, I am not immediately interested in a progression schedule with progression commitments. Am I any less skilled at the game? I doubt it, maybe a little out of practice, but I'm not worried. So I want to take Da Crew under my wing and make them into the best raiders they can be, on a shorter time schedule. In comparison, the typical Da Crew person raids less than half the hours of the progression team in a week, and that's even not a lot of hours given most progression guilds raid 20+ hours every week.

I'm interested in where this will take me, since I have always pushed myself to be a US or even world class player. Will Da Crew be able to find it's voice and it's place in the guild, or even the WOW community as a whole. I am very optimistic.

From hell's heart I stab at thee!

2011-11-30T07:41:00.000-08:00

Thanksgiving sucked.

I hadn't been back to South Dakota in about 2 years, and I was really excited to see my family and a ton of people that I hadn't been around in a while. Everyone was doing really well, and doing fun things, having babies, going to college, having boyfriends/girlfriends, and enjoying life. While hearing about all this and talking to everyone, I was having a hard time coming up with anything that I could tell them about how good things are with me. I have a very social, attractive fun family and I already felt like the black sheep, so this compounded my problems.

I feel like all I have is this big dumb brain, which inhibits me more than anything. I’m not especially good looking or friendly. Being social is hit and miss; sometimes I really enjoy myself, other times I just want it to end. This is all hitting me today. All the change I set up for myself over the last year seems to have been a pretty big failure. Crappy job, no relationship prospects, and my self-esteem has never been lower.

I hate my job, but as I look for a new one, I get scared of making another career mistake. Working for my company is stressful and unfulfilling. The work and the theory behind what I do is interesting, but the management at the company is nonexistent; they seem more interested in making money and jumping through hoops for new customers than getting the fundamentals right. Their software is just a bunch of hacks they throw on top of one another to keep the system going. It’s not a place for an electrical engineer; it seems like more of a place for someone with a finance or business degree. I have a pretty bleak opinion about commodities and financial trading, and this job isn’t helping.

Quitting outright seems like a better and better option every day, even if I don’t have another job lined up. Something in the back of my mind says that this experience is making me stronger, but I feel like it is just killing me softly. I still work with my old employer once a week, and they are always telling me I can come back, but this just makes things worse. It reminds me that my job is a pile of steaming excrement.

I want to move out of Colorado, but I waffle on that front as well. Where do I want to be? Will I miss having my family around? Will I just eventually hate it there as well and am I trapped in some weird cycle?

I don't want to be unhappy; every day I try to do things and think things that get me in a better mood, or cheer me up. The same old tricks and my tried and true methods aren’t working anymore: Upgrading my computer, playing video games, good beer, and sushi. First world problems I suppose, but they are MY first world problems.

This big down note is probably needed though. You need the bad to appreciate the good. It just sucks fucking ass when all the good and all the bad hits at once.

Addicted to Love

2011-11-22T10:38:00.000-08:00

If there has been one thing that confused and interested right and left brained people alike throughout the ages, I think love tops the list. Whether it be chemical, spiritual, or soulful, love eludes us and tantalizes us even when you think you have a grasp on it. Whatever "it" is, its power cannot be questioned.

Love affects the brain in strange ways; many people have made the comparison that love is a drug. I tend to agree. I've been in love. It makes a person do very strange and uncharacteristic things. It can take many forms. I have loved family, women, friends, games, and other things. It makes you feel good about yourself to have something other than yourself that you can care about, and if administered correctly, love has as symbiotic effect that enhances that feeling tremendously if that love is returned. Prolonged exposure to this love substance has a high chance of addiction, and I think a lot of people who have breakups, lose a loved one, or can't interact with an activity in the same way suffer from serious withdrawal. Hi, my name is Eric, and it's been 18 months since my last hit.

This sobering period has made me rethink who I am as a person since the ex. We were madly in love, and this led to a severe withdrawal. There was a short period of downtime after we broke up, but my love addiction needed to be sated. I look back on the last year and I have been desperate for a fix, something to pick me up and keep me going. In retrospect, I was dating compulsively; I threw a lot of time and energy into seeking other people out, hoping to have the love demon quieted. I think I am recovered, but there is a long journey ahead. I feel like an alcoholic who has just discovered he has a problem with alcohol; he is not sure if he can trust himself with the substance that has caused him so much pain.

Is love real? You betcha. For all you nay sayers out there, you just haven't tried it, or are recovering like me and the only way to stay clean is the not acknowledge that it exists. That’s fine though. Do I want to stay clean forever? At the moment, yes; I’m not sure who I will meet, or where I will be but I’m confident that at some point in the future that crazy potion #9 will end up back in my system.

Venting

2011-09-25T18:44:00.000-07:00

Right now Basek is getting on my nerves. I have the feeling that he doesn’t want me to raid with the 25man team in any capacity. It seems like he doesn’t want to bring me in as a backup, even on farm nights, and I have asked a couple times to do farm content with the guild and I have gotten no for an answer. Maybe I am asking too much from the guild to raid with the main team if I don’t have the time to dedicate to being a full time raider. I will talk to him and see if there is some sort of miscommunication.
He is very optimistic and charismatic, and also doesn’t take any shit from anyone. It seems to me he is much more of a cheerleader raid leader than I am accustomed to, but I think he is getting the job done.

Big Crits is currently working on heroic Ragnaros, and he and I disagree whether the guild could have downed him without the most recent nerfs on the boss. While I agree that we have a stronger raiding team than ever before, I doubt that we have enough raid comp flexibility and kill Ragnaros as it was designed initially. There are guilds out there who are more skilled than ours, who have been 6/7 since the beginning of August, and who still haven’t killed H-Rag yet. Unless Big Crits wants to bash its’ face in on a boss for 3+ months before killing it, I think that the nerfed version would be a better use of its time and not getting burned out on the game. Sure Basek doesn’t care either way, but attrition will set in and we will lose players to getting burned out or going to more progressed guilds; recruiting will get harder, and ultimately the guild will be weaker so that he can get that pre nerf satisfaction.

For that matter, neither of us have a choice in the matter, the nerfbat has hit, and none of us have control over it. Back in Sunwell, my old guild spent about a solid month and a half on Muru, and while it was satisfying to kill, nobody cares that we did that after all this time. It’s nice in my mind, and I can brag about it to people who are long time players, but ultimately I would have rather been 6/6 than beating my face against that fuckhead. Nobody will care if Big Crits killed a pre nerf Rag even 6 months from now, because the player base has the attention span of a gnat.

Snoz has been a big help to the guild in terms of recruiting and financing, and he is a lovable asshole, except when he is being an asshole to you. He keeps poking me that my 10man never got heroic Alakir. To that I say, his group was cherrypicked from the 25man team (mine wasn’t) and his group had 10 raiders that knew how to not fuck up phase 1 (mine didn’t).

Our 10man spent way too much time in phase 1 because we had a healer that continuously died to lightning, and the healers couldn’t keep up in Phase 2 in general. Snoz’s group had 2 shadow priests where our group had none, and due to the damage stacking buff with the healing done by vampiric embrace, this really provides a lot of raid healing to the group so that you can push the fight further. They also had Rationality who was hands down the best healer in the guild. For all I care, Snoz can shove his four winds title up his ass, I got mine first anyways.

The Zen of Dating

2011-08-23T20:00:00.000-07:00

I recently read a short primer on Zen and the theory, and I think it shed some light on how the world works a little bit. From what I understand, one becomes enlightened via meditation and disconnecting your mind from thinking about the answer to your question. Instead of reaching the answer from logic, deduction and reaching for external assistance, one turns the eye inward and reaching that outward answer via introspection. I think some of these concepts can be applied to dating.

Dating 101
Let me say from the start that dating sucks. For the most part, the act of putting yourself out there for other people to window shop, judge, critique, and nitpick whether you are worthy of their time can be a fruitless activity. Dating does have its potential upside (otherwise we wouldn't do it), but there is a lot of downside to go with it. Granted it does go both ways and you are continuously on the lookout for a higher number on the 1-10 scale.

Online dating in general I think is a pretty treacherous place. There are many unspoken rules, and every person has their own expectations and preconceived notions of how they expect things to happen. The thing with online dating is that it's becoming a more commonly accepted avenue of meeting people, so the pool of participants is growing; I'm not sure the pool of participants has the potential for shrinking anytime soon though.

It's a game. Dating is a game, and people want to win. All the players will naturally want to catch the biggest fish possible, and because of this the most attractive (physical, career, personality, potential) participants will get the most attention from the people in the dating pool, while the least attractive people will get barely any attention at all. It's kind of a vicious system, but I think that's life. This imbalance exists in many facets of life, but the online environment lowers the barriers of communication and reduces the social friction of approaching a potential date.

There is another dimension of attractiveness that is very intriguing, and it is very subjective. It seems to me at least that those who are the most eager to date and put the most energy into dating or starting a new relationship are the people who are the least likely to succeed. They are trying too hard, and end up having the least amount of success. I'm definitely guilty of this with a couple girls that I date. This may just be an indicator of how lots of different people behave, but I think there is some human aversion to others that overextend themselves.

My Dating Reflections
The last year has been unfulfilling for the most part. After my breakup with Erin, I waited a few months and then decided I was ready to get back out there and meet girls. Mostly this was because of loneliness, and I missed having someone else in my life. Looking back, this was not the best thing to do at the time; I am just now coming to terms with the breakup about a year later and being able to accept it and move past it .

Over the course of the year, I think I talked to dozens of women and went on countless dates but all I have to show for it are a few girls that I actually connected with. These girls were people that could be myself around, enjoyed their company, and were physically attracted to. I think it was these girls that I learned the most from, but in the end I learned something new from everyone that I spent time with.

Things I learned. Don't rush, love grows as people become closer; if you are forcing it, you are doing it wrong. Be true to yourself first; you are useless to a potential partner if you don't know how to be content without someone else. If you are doing all the leg work, and clearing your schedule for someone else, they probably aren't that into you or just like the attention. Don't assume you are the only person they are seeing, especially if you are seeing multiple people as well. Get outside your comfort zone once in a while, you will probably meet some interesting people.

The dating process has been more of a self education and introspection rather than bearing fruit for meeting someone else. Like I said, it has the potential of meeting someone who is awesome and knocks your socks off is always present, but I think nature of the system becomes an exercise in game theory; why commit to something when you can roll the dice one more time and see what else may come. While I may not have a woman to show for it, I think I have come out of the process a better person, and it was a lesson in catharsis.

The Online Dating Model
I said before that online dating is growing and becoming the new standard for finding the man or woman of your dreams. This may or may not be true, but I am of the opinion that the trend is that if there is something that can be improved by adding an online component, it is generally done and adds an efficiency to it. Whether the efficiency benefits the operators or the users is up for debate. It's a useful tool, but I think it becomes a crutch for the average John or Jane that is looking for that special someone. For the dating sites, it is of more benefit to get you to keep paying a subscription to that system, than to lose two customers who fall in love. That's probably a little heavy handed and cynical, but it seems plausible.

From my experience, a computer or some algorithm matches people based on similarities in personality and what their expectations are for a mate. From my experience, these sites aren't terribly good. To quote Sheldon from Big Bang Theory, "They claim to use heuristic algorithms, but it may well be hokum." Over the year I used eHarmony, I would say that only about one in ten people they matched me with seemed like we would actually have any potential. This may be my mental filter hard at work, but some just seemed way off. I would argue that having access the matching criteria turns on a lot of the mental filters that we have, and a lot of people don't get a chance before you mentally discard them.

Physical attraction is paramount. If you say different, you might be kidding yourself. It doesn't matter what your profile says if the other person isn't pulled in by that initial physical attraction. As I wrote that first sentence, I heard poets and scribes from the ages calling out in pain "Love is blind!"I really wish it was, but tragically we are human. I think it is beautiful when emotional chemistry and compatibility transcends the physical, but the rest of us are initially pulled together by physical attraction. Once that connection is made, we are then poking and prodding each other and evaluating the other person on an emotional level.

I think that one fault that the online dating system suffers from is that people have too much information available to them before they decide to get to know the other person. From a glance, you can know crazy amount about that person even before you decide to get in touch with them and see if the dating potential is there. This coupled with the sheer amount of people in the system makes the snap judgment a very effective tool. Maybe too effective.

Having too much information also makes getting to know that person a little awkward. Based on what the other person put out there, you most likely know where they are from, brothers and sisters, what they do for work, how much they make, if they want to have kids, and a whole slew of other things. Granted the other person isn't going to quiz you on what you put in your profile (and if they do, run fast and run far) but I think there is more value in the process of discovering these things rather than the information itself. This is one situation where I would say less is definitely more.

Dating might be a necessary evil though. While you play a game that may or may not favor you, I think it is important for people to date. You might hit the jackpot on the very first slot machine pull, or it might take you a few different machines to get the payoff, but I think the process is important. It builds character. Through meeting people and potential mates, you learn a lot about the world you live in, and you also learn about yourself. Spending time around people and situations that are unfamiliar helps you grow as a person, and as an extra bonus there is someone right there with you whom you are sharing the experience with; the bonus is that they might decide to keep you.

Ten Man Raiding: A Post-Mortem

2011-08-04T10:04:00.000-07:00

After raid leading 25mans during Wrath, I decided to see how the 10man side of progression raiding would measure up to what I thought was the more stressful and chaotic 25man side of things. While it lived up to my expectations in some areas, 10man progression raiding underperformed drastically in some areas. Would I call it a win or a loss? I’d call it a wash. Both models have their warts, but as long as the Internet exists, there will be people from both camps lobbing grenades at each other. Let’s dive in.

The Good:
- Easier to assemble.
So you decided you want to raid, or want to put together a raiding team. Depending on how many friends you have (who play wow, know what raiding is, and aren’t that bad at the game and/or how many people you can pull from trade chat or the realm forums) odds are pulling 9 other people together is always easier to manage than 24. I still applaud this decision made back in Wrath.

- Less Loot
Less loot is a good thing? Whaaaaa? Loot drama all but disappears when there are only 1-2 people in the raid that can use a given item. Trinkets are still a wild card, as are tier tokens, but generally everyone stays pretty happy. Less loot = less complex loot systems, and all the crazy DKP variants are sort of redundant.

- Geometry
Need to spread out? There is an ENORMOUS space for you to do so. Generally spread out mechanics are trivialized by 10man raiding, but to be fair 25man raids pull someone back from the brink if “that guy” messes up a spread out mechanic. I’m still giving this one to the 10mans.

- Less downtime
From my experience there is far less time spend on raid chatter, and wipe recovery is a lot quicker when there are less people to manage. I think everyone does a lot more self-policing when the anonymity factor goes away. You are more accountable to the people around you because you have a much bigger effect on the success of the raid.

- Everyone’s voice gets heard.
Since the sea of voices is diminished, you might hear from people who don’t normally speak up and offer useful advice. As a raid leader, you will probably get a good perspective from other points of view during an encounter, and parsing the useful advice gets a little easier.

The Bad:
- Everyone’s voice gets heard…
As long as there are more than two people in close proximity, someone is going to have an opinion about something else. Raiding is no exception. There is less inertia for people to have their voices heard, and people are also going to take advantage of that and speak to an audience.

- Less Loot
Another double edged sword. While the boss does drop loot that is pretty much tailored for 1-2 specs, the boss loot tables are so big, that getting 2-3 pieces from a 15 item table can create a lot of problems and if you are really unlucky, you may never end up getting that piece that you want. 25mans get to sample the loot table more times, so there is a greater chance that something you want will drop even though the loot/raider ratio is the same.

- Fighting the raid buff boss
It becomes very difficult to balance a raid group and making sure that you have all the raid buffs possible, which will help your chances of success dramatically. Given the ridiculous amount of buffs/debuffs/auras there are available, all I can say is that I hope you have a hunter and a shaman to fill in the gaps. We ran for the longest time without the 3% damage buff in the raid, and while I am sure it didn’t make that much difference, it would have been a huge help. I even know some teams that ran without druids before warlocks and death knights were given battle reses. That is huge for an encounter and recovering from and RNG death.
Don’t even talk to me about raid cooldowns. 25man wins it flat out in that situation.

- One death usually means wipe.
Having one person die to an encounter means very different things when you compare the two sizes of raid. Losing 10% of your raid vs 4% of your raid is a big deal. I have raided a little bit with the Big Crits 25man team, Da Crew, as well as pugging 25man raids and you can usually limp through an encounter after losing 3-5 people. If you have a person die on 10man, the encounter is generally considered over.

- Thinner social fabric
This one I think is the most important thing. As it is much easier to form a 10man raiding team, it is equally easier to dissolve one. A 25man raiding team carries with it much more inertia with it in terms of people wanting to play together, and friendships forged. There is more team spirit and camaraderie in a 25man raid that stays together than a 10man. Another raider and I decided to quit at about the same time on our 10man team and it pretty much meant lights out for the team.

Lessons Learned:
The major drawing point for me to start 10man progression raiding was that smaller tight knit groups required less cats to herd, communication from raid leader to raider was more clear, and that the raiders would have a bigger interest in having the raid succeed. The density of raiders would be able to gel and everyone would be able to play off the other raiders’ strengths and weaknesses. Ultimately this was true, but the flaw in my plan was that turnover happens, and when it does, filling that hole becomes incredibly difficult. Tier 11 was really hard to recruit raiders for, especially given the careful class/buff/gear balance that 10mans have to take into consideration.

Ten mans also suffer from the daydream that you can have 10 and only 10 raiders, given all the other balances that need to be kept in check. Raiders want to raid, and sitting on the bench for a 10man seems like such a foreign concept. It’s not uncommon for a 25man to have a raiding roster of 35 people given people’s availability and boss encounter compositions. In retrospect, having a bigger bench would have helped tremendously. Real life happens, and when it does, it can cripple an entire raid night.

I suppose it doesn’t matter whether you are raiding 10s or 25s, but one bad apple spoils the bunch. Every raiding team has their “that guy” whether they can’t find his interrupt button, they can’t manage their sound on Atramedes, or they lack a functioning mic to warn that they just did something bad. I guess it is all relative, based on the perceptions of the rest of your raiding team; I have definitely been that guy before.

As far as the fun factor, I had a lot of fun in both environments, but I think that depends more on the people that you raid with rather than the size of the raid. To each his/her own in that regard. I hope to get back into progression raiding eventually, either with Big Crits or some yet to be found guild full of cool people. As for the moment, life is calling me in other directions.

Sometimes I hate iTunes shuffle...so much.

2011-07-22T00:37:00.000-07:00

Why is this bothering me so much? Not iTunes, bless it's heart. She got married. Like a punch in the gut or a slap in the face. I turn on music for some solace and all it has to offer me is "You can't always get what you want" Really? That is what you have for me? Normally I don't mind the Stones, but come on.

I don't know what I want, but a little notification would have been great, even though it is none of my business. I guess you never really forget the one that broke your heart. She cheated, lied, and stonewalled her way half of our relationship.

I don't deserve any of it, not then, not now. I don't deserve feeling bad and still thinking back about her and being left with clues and mysteries about how she destroyed our relationship with another man, fooling around with one of her students, and disregarding me like a broken toy. How can you do these things and then tell someone to their face that you love them more than anything and that care for them and want them to be happy?

Why do I care? That's a legitimate question. Why can't I just be indifferent to her? I guess it really just gets my goat when people lie to me. Why can't you just tell me the truth and more importantly just be honest with yourself? She lied to me when we were together, what makes me thing she would tell me the truth that she was getting married after I left her. We sent emails occasionally, why not mention say, oh, I'm getting married.

Nobody can hide the truth, and especially not protect people from it.

Obviously you didn't want to stick around. So I learned from you.

Hard to Find

2011-07-08T23:05:00.000-07:00

So, odds are you aren't reading this. That's probably a good thing. I don't think I would like you to see me like this. I'm a bit lost and having a hard time finding you. You sure don't want to be found very easily; I guess they are right, the chase is the best part. Hah. Yea.

I need a little help. Where are you? At least give me an indication where I can start.

You are probably hiding in a coffee shop or bookstore somewhere, but won't be there for long. You don't really tend to stay in one place. Heaven forbid, you are on the internet somewhere complacent in watching me squirm. Even if I found you, approaching you would be a tricky thing; I'm not great at first impressions, or even small talk. I don't peacock to try to get your attention, and the things I want to say can't be broken down into something very clever to say in a 20 second conversation.

I'm funny and interesting, I promise =) Oh those scars on my head? They are from growing up and playing rough sports. I'm not some frankenstein, not been in a car accident or something catastrophic. Just life.

Yea, I am nerdy, but it doesn't define me. I'm smart, but I have compassion. What am I interested in? Life mainly. Thinking about people and the world. I am reserved and sometimes like to watch things from afar, but I will try anything once. I'm not easily excited, sorry, but I am passionate about many things, and I wish they were tangible so that I could show people exactly what they were. It's hard to communicate ideas; they can only be learned or discovered, not told.

I guess I will find you when I am ready to. I hope your patience holds out.

What to do from here.

2011-05-16T19:47:00.000-07:00

So, new job is good.

It is good to feel challenged again, and to be truly over my head in a few areas. Time management is going to save my life at this job. Once I get the hang of it, it will be nice. One thing that will take some getting used to is the hours. I expect to be traveling and working longer hours than I have typically. This might put a damper on WoW, raid leading, and will probably make dating a little rougher.

Ah, dating. The cause of and solution to all life's problems.

Ugh. I despise dating at the moment. I am doing my damnest to date as many girls as possible, but all in all I am just tired of the carousel. I tell myself that by seeing a variety of girls, I will learn about what I am looking for, and meet new cool people. Fact of the matter is, I don't want to meet new and cool people at all; being an introvert is a little of who I am, and the thought of many people makes me a little nervous. I'm ready again to meet someone who I can build something with. I miss being with someone.

It's hard. I don't feel like I am being really picky, but it just takes a certain person who feels like they understand me; and likewise. I am just very discouraged at the moment. Things tell me I just have to wait for the perfect storm to hit me and shake me to my core. It's a paradox. I don't feel like I am ready to love anyone again, and there are still wounds that haven't healed. Catharsis I suppose.

I miss Erin. She was a big part of my life, and I learned a lot about myself while I was with her. I still have dreams about her, and think about her randomly, but I know that we will never be the people that the other wants. Maybe that's why we loved each other. She will be better off with some other hopeless jerk, at least I hope. A song lyric comes to mind:

"You want your freedom? Take it.
That's what I'm counting on
I used to want you dead, but
Now I only want you gone"

I'm done thinking about her, or at least I wish I was. I want to move on, and I want to let her go out of my mind. Right now, I want another person in my life whom I can share with, and build with. I guess I can go about it one girl at a time.

10man Raiding: Loot and Legendaries

2011-04-14T11:17:00.001-07:00

A welcome change to 10man raiding this expansion was the attempt to make the 10 and 25man raiding feel similar. In order to do this Blizzard made the decision to have each flavor of raiding drop the same quality of gear. While I really enjoy this decision, I think some improvements can be made on the system.

Currently boss loot tables are very large. Every boss has a table that is 12 items large. As a rule of thumb, the 10man bosses drop 2 items per kill, and the 25man bosses drop 5 items per kill. I understand that this is a simple ratio of players per kill getting loot this model assumes 20% of your raid will get a piece of loot per boss. Assuming that the stars align and everyone gets what they want off the boss, you raid needs to kill the five times before everyone’s main specs are taken care of. This is a fallacy and only works in an ideal world, but the world (of warcraft) is hardly ideal. Yes I am still making that joke.

The problem we are running into on our 10man heroic raids is that we seem to be getting the same items a majority of the time, or never seeing items that several people in the raid could use. I realize that the loot is based on random numbers, but I feel that the 25mans raids get a better shake at the loot table for a couple reasons:

1) Representation. Every boss has loot for most combinations of class/spec, but a 10man doesn’t necessarily have all those combinations represented. For the longest time, we did not have a person in the raid that could use mail intellect gear in our raid for their main spec. If mail int gear drops, it immediately goes to waste unless someone could use it for offspec that they would play for 1-2 encounters. Given that the 10man raids are trying to balance raid buffs with class composition and tier token distribution it can be very difficult to have all the gear that drops go to people who can use it.

2) Tier Tokens. The 10man heroic bosses that drop tokens for tier gear all drop 1 token per kill, while their 25man counterparts drop 3. Compound this with the fact that the token can take one of three flavors and the classes that use these can be imbalanced based on raid composition. We have 5 people vying for Vanq tokens (which is half our raid). the 10man suffers a disadvantage not only waiting for RNG to drop the token that your raid needs for an upgrade, but also that the 25mans receive more tokens per player on every kill. 25mans have a better variety of drops, and get more per kill.

3) Probablity. In 25mans, a raid gets to sample a bosses loot table 5 times, and conversely 10mans get to sample that same loot table twice. In any statistical measure, the more samples that you can take from a set, the more likely those samples will resemble the how that set is distributed. If every piece of loot has an equal chance of dropping from a boss, then every piece of loot should see an equal distribution in those samples. Given that the 25man raid samples takes more samples from that set, they are more likely to see all the given possibilities that that set contains in comparison to 10man raids. A 25man raid will be more likely to get gear that is designed for a certain class/spec than a 10man raid will.

With 4.2, legendaries are going to enter the picture as well. Blizzard has stated that the 10mans will have access to legendary items, but it will take them ~2-2.5 times more time to create them via whatever shape the process will take. I am guess it will be a shard/fragment type acquisition process given that is the model chosen for Ulduar and Icecrown Citadel. I am disappointed in this that the 10mans are already suffering a gear gap in relation to 25man raiding (albeit much smaller than Wrath), and this gap is going to widen in Firelands.

I guess you can take this all as just QQ, but I am proposing a few possible solutions:

1) Have 10mans drop 3 pieces of gear per boss, but the 3rd slot has the possibility of being the same as slots 1&2. 25man raids already have this feature enabled, as our 25mans have seen 3 agility staffs drop off Heroic Halfus, and 3 caster maces off Nefarian. Having a 3rd available loot drop will help the 10man sample more of the loot table than they can currently while still giving similar probability that nobody needs the extra piece and it can be sharded. Also, seeing as Firelands is going to have less bosses than the current tier, I assume that the loot tables are going to be bigger, which gives the 10man even less access to the whole table over time.

2) Remove the Conq, Vanq, Prot type from the Tier tokens. It is frustrating seeing the same type of token dropping and being used for offpsecs when there are others in the raid who still need it for their main specs. Based on how this tier of raiding has gone so far, many would argue that 10man heroic raids are more taxing on the raiders and raid comps, and the extra gear could help 10man progression catch up to 25man progression. I would also entertain tokens that were binary instead of trinary; there are 10 classes in the game now, why not just split them down the middle and make a “of the X” and “of the Y” which serve 5 classes each?

3) Normalize 10man and 25man legendary acquisition. When I read that 25man raids would be in the fast lane in terms of legendary creation, it was a slap in the face to 10man raiding. It made me think back to when Blizzard stated their intentions to remove a lot of the parity between 10man and 25man raiding, and legendary creation favoring the 25man raid negates that intention. I realize that legendaries are supposed to be rare and unique and difficult to attain, but biasing the speed at which you acquire them is a bad decision. It takes a village (or a guild, or a raid) to do something great, why not include everyone in the raid in that creation process and then impose a cooldown on how often that process can be repeated? I realize that Blizzard is trying to bottleneck legendaries so that 10man raids don’t just become fragment factories, but there are more elegant ways of doing this than just hamstringing the 10man fragment drop rate. As stated before 10mans already suffer from bad probability of getting things that they want, this just amplifies the problem.

Thanks for reading, and hopefully we can have a good discussion about alleviating this problem.

Out to get me.

2011-04-06T14:27:00.000-07:00

I'm having a difficult time acclimating into the world at the moment. I am a fairly naive person, in that I assume that most people are truly good at heart and will treat other people in their lives with respect and dignity. This is easy for me to understand and accept.

Where it breaks down is when people are kind or nice to me as a person. I almost immediately begin analyzing the interactions for malice, or looking for devious intentions.

My Beef with eHarmony

2011-02-21T15:45:00.000-08:00

I am sorry if this whole post comes across as bitter. I am enjoying the process of eHarmony for what it is worth, but there are some very glaring problems I see with this way of dating.

So, I've been subscribed to eHarmony for about 6 months; I signed up after my previous relationship ended, and I was looking for a way to alleviate the loneliness I was feeling at the time. I admit, it was probably not the best thing for me to do at that moment, but I was looking for a way to ease my way back into the scene and it seemed like a great way to meet people. So one late night (probably after a few beers) I took the personality test, and figured what the hell, let me sign up for a year and see what happens.

Let me say up front that eHarmony is not a great way to meet people. I have had various degrees of success with the model. I dated someone seriously during some of my tenure, I have sent numerous message requests, gone through the hand holding "guided communication" and had entire email conversations with people that eventually evaporate. There are artificial barriers up all over the place that actually prevent potential matches from communicating with each other, rather than getting people together. My main gripe is that by the time two people jump through all the hoops and stages of communication, reading reports on their personality, and speaking in messages, there is very little left to talk about between the two people; all the potential small talk has been smothered out of the equation. It is almost like I saw how the sausage was made before actually trying it.

One thing that differentiates eHarmony from other dating websites is the 29 dimensions of compatibility system that you are matched with other people. The matching system sends you several people per day that the system has matched you up with based on the personality profile you completed. After about 6 months, at a rate of ~6 matches a day, I now am matched with 340 women. I looked at that number one day, and thought "Wow this is depressing. There are 340 people that either I don't find particularly interesting or attractive, or they don't feel that way about me; either I am being way too picky, or there is something really putting off about my profile." I think self consciousness always sets in before rational thought, but now that I think about it, I am pretty sure the matching system isn't as good as they advertise.

When you set up your profile, you can setup a profile of likes/dislikes as well called "Something to Talk About." These are things like, what sports do you follow, what kind of music do you like, are you a dog/cat person etc. This profile is just the little goofy things that everyone likes/dislikes; It resembles a mini profile of you. What bothers me is that the system will match me with someone, and most of my matches will have zero or few matches in this mini profile. I would assume that if the system is matching me on 29 dimensions of my personality, almost every profile would have at least some of these little things line up as well.

The website also makes you choose your "Must Haves/Can't Stands" so that you can communicate to people you are matched with the things that you are unwilling to compromise with. I like this idea in theory, but I come across people that I start communicating with and as soon as I read their list and compare it with mine, I wonder why I was matched up with this other person in the first place. Is the model wrong? Is the model comparing or measuring the wrong things?

In fact, every other profile starts to look like a cookie cutter of the last one after a while. After looking at all the profiles I have seen, I can predict what the next girls are going to say: I love my friends and family, I am grateful for all the opportunities I have had in my life, and I want to meet someone who I can laugh with. It is starting to sound like these girls are writing to Santa. I think it has to do with the personality test that they give everyone to begin. You answer about a half hour's worth of questions and almost feel sedated at the end of it, so by then you brain can't really produce anything unique or expressive about who you are. Ok, maybe there is some hyperbole in there, but there also may be a kernel of truth.

There are some things that the website does pretty well. It is great at being a non-threatening place where singles can let a computer program take some of the burden off their shoulders in terms of looking for a date; however getting you in contact with another person is not one of those things that it does all that well. In fact I would argue that it does the opposite. I don't think that eHarmony has a real incentive to match people up with each other. They are a business after all. One of their motivations must be to make money at some point in the process. After 6 months in the system, it feels more like a trap than a place where I am supposed to be meeting others. Here are a few reasons why:

1) The system finds people for you, rather that letting you search out and filter people based on what you are looking for. This seems counter-intuitive to me.

2) The system delivers you a few new matches at a time, which keeps you coming back to the website every day, or at least frequently. It also delivers new people to you even though you may be getting to know someone, which could make you think the grass is greener somewhere if your current match starts to lose his sparkle.

3) The guided communication is actually a barrier to communication. It is fun the first few times to send lists with checkboxes back and forth the first few times. After you have been through it enough though, it get very tedious and starts to feel like jumping through hoops.

4) It is expensive. It can be argued that the cost of the service keeps it for people who are serious about finding a relationship, and keeps the lurkers out. I think that is very true, but it does cost much more than other services.

I would argue that the website has an incentive to keep you coming back to the website, impede the communication between people, and not allow you to browse and search the other people in the database, simply because it keeps you subscribed to the service and paying a monthly fee. Neil Clark Warren aint cheap.

Did Cataclysm shoot itself in the foot?

2011-02-16T07:41:00.000-08:00

My spider sense is tingling lately about this expansion so far, and it boils down to the spectrum of difficulty in all of the content. It's not that the content is really hard, but that a LOT of the content is hard, and there is not much that one can coast and have some mindless fun.

My hat goes off to Blizzard. They did everything they said they would. There are no face roll player rotations anymore, heroic dungeons require a lot of attention (at least on the first few times through), raids are tuned and balanced (with some glaring exceptions on 10man) and the world and the stories are told where every zone is a nice complete package.

I was very excited going into this expansion. Things are going to be difficult again, things are going to be challenging I told myself. 10man and 25man are going to be equal progression paths, and I can lead a 10man with much less headache than I led our 25man in ICC. It's going to be great! I won't be a stressed wreck raid leader, and I am going to have a lot of fun!

While I am having fun with the raiders that I play with, I am already tired out by the raiding content. I am tired out given I am continuously recruiting replacements for raiders that flake. I am tired out by hotfixes and changes to classes and encounters that need to be relearned regularly. I am tired out by my complex rotation that I have to theorycraft and change when patches hit (I'm looking at you Holy Power CS/HOTR fuckery); compounding the problem is learning my new game pad which I specifically bought to combat the lack of real estate for all the new goddamn buttons that I have to push not just for my main spec, but for my offspec and my shaman's main and offspec. I'm tired of feeling like an inadequate raid leader when other guilds progress faster than we do, and I am tired of letting down my raiders when I fail.

So what changed? Why does this, the introductory tier of raiding, feel insurmountable? I think is has to do with the spectrum of difficulty in comparison to previous introductory tiers. In Vanilla and TBC, there was a LONG "training" you had to go through (leveling up) to get into dungeons and raiding and it was learned ad-hoc based on who you happened to come across in the "Looking for Group" chat. You have new abilities to learn and integrate, but the learning curve was pretty slow. I remember it taking months before I could call myself ready to step into a Karazhan.

Wrath took a little quicker pace. The leveling time was quicker than TBC, everyone got shiny new toys, learned how to use them and then jumped into raids. Rotations were more complex than TBC, but that was buffered by the ease of the first tier or raiding. A player could learn and hone their skills in an actual raid environment while getting that sense of fun and achievement.

I think where the breakdown for me is that Cataclysm is challenging for me on all fronts. Everyone got shiny new toys, and we got shot up the express lane to 85, reducing the time to acclimate to all the new hotness. Raiding has become juggling a 5+ button rotation/priority system, while managing your resources, while paying attention to boss mechanics and moving out of the bad. It is not that those things individually are terribly difficult, but doing them all at the same time is exhausting, not to mention the addictive nature of content progression "Oh grats everyone we killed that boss, now we learn the next boss".

I'm not sure what this means for the game as a whole. I'm not sure this translates to fun for the average player. If I am frustrated right now, I am not sure what this means for people that used to faceroll to loot.

I am having fun playing with my friends. I'm not sure I am having more fun raiding.

Failures of a Raid Leader

2011-02-14T09:01:00.000-08:00

We pulled heroic Atramedes last night and failed. I think everyone was on top of their game and we did all we could, but at the end of the night my John Madden strategy just wasn't good. We all decided to stack the raid and move between two points to avoid sound discs. The problem with this was that if we were on the move avoiding discs and Atramades picked someone for Sonic Breath, that person had literally nowhere to go and either they died or the raid died. We even tried giving that person a speed boost and run it to safety, but even that did not work.

It really sucks to see something you thought about so hard literally go up in flames. I thought about it very hard, drew it up on a white board, heck I even put it up on Youtube for all my raiders to see. We all checked it out and thought it would lead us to victory. It also sucks when we tweak the bad strat and not get through the fight at all.

I felt really low at the end of last night. I felt like a failure, not only as a person, but as a leader. I didn't want to play this game ever again. I let myself down, and I let the people I play with down and wasted everyone's night. Nobody likes to fail. It stings even more to see other guilds downing content and bragging about how easy it is, when we struggle and have nights full of wiping. It's depressing how bad I feel right now because I feel like I wasted everyone's time.

Raiding is really starting to burn me out. I am taking way too much responsibility on my shoulders, and it the needle is getting dangerously close to the work spectrum of this game. Making raid strategies is really fun, and it is satisfying to see them work, and it grinds everyone's gears to fail repeatedly doing the wrong thing. I guess this is the part that frustrates all of us the most.

It's also fucking annoying when your 2nd in command yells at everyone about not fucking up, and the proceeds to wiping the raid with Sonic Breath. Good Job Burble.

Life and Love

2011-02-03T10:44:00.000-08:00

This is probably the first time in my life where I don't have any interest in a relationship, and I am okay with that. I've loved, been loved, hurt lovers, been hurt, played the game, been played, been patient, been hasty, thought about children, thought about 5 years from now, thought about moving, rearranged my life for someone, considered changing who I am for someone, laughed, cried, given rings, had them thrown back at me, broken peoples trust, had my trust broken, had one night stands, had relationships not reach first base, had soul fulfilling great sex, had sex for the sake of fucking, had bad sex, had dry spells, been jealous, been not jealous when I should have been, been reckless, been needy, worn my heart on my sleeve, pretended like everything was okay, been naive, overlooked people's faults, been too critical, clammed up, held a grudge, felt rejected, been in a position of power, escaped, lied, been lied to, felt lied to, listened, not listened, not cared, had adventures, had unexpected adventures, cared for someone else more than myself, carried the weight, been a burden, been obsessed, been infatuated, and it seems like it was all for naught.

Would I do it all again? I am not sure. Would I have done things differently? Probably. Has it left me a better person? I don't think so, but I don't think I am any worse. Do I wish I still had love in my life? You betcha. Am I optimistic? Romantically yes, practically no. People get into new relationships because their previous or current ones suck.

The Hybrid Gap - PUGs and Raiders

2010-11-23T08:50:00.000-08:00

If we are going to talk about the hybrid gap, we need to define our terms. In my eyes, there are two vastly different worlds in endgame WoW: The PUG world and The Raider World.

The raider world consists of organized guilds that have a team of raiders who plays with each other regularly and bring a balanced composition to every raid. All the raid buffs are accounted for, classes are represented fairly equally and a good balance of melee and ranged is achieved. Raiders are scrutinized to a higher level on how they spec, gem, enchant, gear, glyph, and a million other nits that get picked; this occurs when they apply to a guild and constantly by officers and other raiders.

The PUG world is a raid assembled ad-hoc depending on who is available in trade chat and who’s friend knows a tank or healer. There are competent people here and there are people who are seeing things for the first time. It’s a wiiiiiide rainbow of people from those who can play the game well and those who might as well be wearing their pants on their heads. Generally there is an 80/20 rule where 80% of the people carry the other 20% and generally the 20% soaks up the loot. PUGs are not doing progression content, and people are generally doing PUGs in order to gear up for applying to raiding guilds or to gear up and play alts. Generally when I think of the PUG world I am talking about the Looking For Dungeon system, because those groups are the purest random gathering of players where the biggest crapshoot of players can be found.

The hybrid tax is present in both situations, but where the rubber meets the road is in the raider world. Raiders understand more about their class than the average PUG, and can get the most out of their character in terms of damage throughput. In the raider world pure DPS has the edge and can typically put out 5% or so more damage than a hybrid DPS class. Things that can sometimes fluxuate are encounter mechanics, class nerfs/buffs, latency, and player skill, but in general if all other things are held equal, a pure DPS will come out on top.

However in a raiding environment, this gap becomes very small and almost unmeasurable due to random events that happen in any given raid encounter (movement being the most common); because of these random events the hybrid gap disappears for the raider. This is not a bad thing, because in a raiding environment, every player has a very specific role to fill and a pure DPS is just as valuable as a hybrid DPS. A hybrid cannot fill two roles at the same time, because the average hybrid does not have the gear or comparable skill set as his DPS, not to mention the overlapping of raid buffs that would need to be retooled on a fight by fight basis. Trust me, it’s a nightmare when we have to have a DPS caster heal for Sindragosa and fill in the missing raid buffs left behind.

The hybrid tax in the raider world is not all that interesting because it disappears due to the random nature of encounters. Until we get another Patchwerk or Brutalus type encounter, DPS throughput is secondary to survivability and how the player uses the other abilities they possess (CC, dispells). Where I find the hybrid tax the most interesting is in the PUG world.

The Hybrid Tax - GONE

2010-11-18T08:22:00.000-08:00

This post is a continuation of the previous, and second in a series exploring "The Hybrid Tax" and how it shapes the game.

The heralded design philosophy of Wrath of the Lich king was “Bring the Player, not the Class.” This phrase might as well be stamped all over every square inch of the expansion, because I swear I have heard this more than 100 times from the developers over the last two years. This philosophy meant that while each talent spec had its own unique flavor and abilities, its throughput and performance would be roughly on par with other classes performing the same role. In addition to normalizing the classes, the developers took the raid buffs that were before isolated to one class, and gave them to two or more classes so that raid compositions could be more flexible.

The caveat is that the pure DPS classes would be tuned to push out more damage than any hybrid DPS class, simply because a pure DPS class doesn’t have the option of fulfill any other role in a PVE environment. While this gap between pure and hybrid still exists, it is vastly smaller than what it was in previous versions of the game. While this is good in theory, things kind of hit the fan when this gets put into practice.

Tanking and healing classes were normalized as well, but more in the sense that Bears, Tankadins and DKs were given versions of the tools that warriors had a monopoly on previously i.e. damage reduction cooldowns (Shield Wall) and temporary health boost (Last Stand). Healers also were given tools so that they could do their jobs more effectively. Each healing class could tank or raid heal to an extent where previously they were SOL.

Hybrid classes have ultimate flexibility in a PVE environment. If a hybrid class wants to change rolls in PVE, then it is a simple 50g and a visit to the trainer. When WOLK first came out, Dual Specialization did not exist. There was a barrier in place if you wanted to change rolls from DPS to Tank to Healing, albeit a small one. It was a pain in the butt to go to town, unlearn everything, re-talent, setup my action bars, and shift my mindset. On average it took about 10 minutes out of my playing time if I wanted to completely change roles. If a pure DPS class wanted to change roles, then there was a much larger time investment involved leveling up a brand new class, not to mention appropriate gearing so that they could compete in current content, and learning the class mechanics.

The class trainer was probably the most popular kid in town before patch 3.1 hit. If someone was playing at endgame, they were most likely carrying two sets of gear and fulfilling two roles, be it PVP and PVE, or carrying an offspec for PVE. Personally, I was respeccing 4-5 times a night during farming Sunwell due to paladins being overpowered at various roles for each boss.

Dual specialization was a boon to almost everyone who played the game when it was first introduced, but it began chipping away the benefit to being a pure DPS class. Everyone who had 1000g can now have fast access to two different sets of talents and glyphs. If a raid leader had a choice between bringing a hybrid DPS with a helpful offspec and a pure DPS to a raid all other things being equal, the hybrid DPS might present itself as a better option given that there is more flexibility in the roles that a hybrid can fill.

The question then becomes, is that marginal DPS between pure and hybrid DPS enough to tip the scales towards the hybrid DPS for that raid spot given that the Hybrid can perform more than one role in a raid? The short answer, maybe. The hybrid DPS could be a good replacement for a pure DPS in my eyes if one of the following are true:

1) The hybrid is completely competent in both of their specs and gear.

2) The pure DPS in question is on the margin either because of survivability or performance.

The long answer will come in the next post. The answer depends on how you play the game.

The Hybrid Tax: Why it matters.

2010-11-16T14:05:00.000-08:00

Wrath of the Lich King did something (of many) very different than it did in the two previous versions of World of Warcraft. WOLK allowed hybrid DPS classes compete with the pure DPS classes directly in terms of how much damage they can push out. This was unheard of in Vanilla and Burning Crusade. I think the WoW community loved this change, myself included, but going into Cataclysm, I feel that it may be time to bring our friend “The Hybrid Tax” back in some form. The next few posts are going to be an exploration of the Hybrid Tax, how it shaped this expansion, and how it will affect the World of Warcraft going forward into Cataclysm.

History of the Tax

Every class in the World of Warcraft has the ability to deal damage to creatures, and by extension gain experience and complete quests via the killing of these creatures, but some classes are more effective than others. The gap in the damage throughput between pure DPS classes (Rogue, Mage, Warlock, Hunter) and hybrid classes (Priest, Druid, Shaman, Paladin, Warrior, Death Knight) is affectionately known as “The Hybrid Tax.” The hybrid tax is Blizzard’s sneaky way of hinting to you that while your character has the ability to deal damage to level up and quest, it could be more effective and useful by filling a different role while interacting with other people at max level in the world (of warcraft).

In Vanilla WoW, hybrid classes (Paladin/Shaman, Druids, Priests and to an extent Warriors) were expected to fill different roles if they wanted to raid and do dungeons. All the hybrid classes were expected to do something completely different compared to what those classes were learning to do from leveling 1-60. This came as quite a shock, given that they spent a significant chunk of time learning how to effectively kill monsters and quest.

The vanilla raiding game was vastly different from what it is today; Hybrids were expected to heal or tank, resistance gear was common depending on which instance you were raiding, and if you were a shadow priest, retribution or protection paladin, DPS druid, or DPS shaman: you were at the bottom of the list in terms of people that were able to be invited to the raid. Not only was your DPS incredibly low, but you had very little ability to sustain your mana, and therefore not able to DPS as long as fights would last; don’t even think about respeccing constantly either since 50g per respec is a scary chunk of gold at the time.

The Burning Crusade opened the door to hybrid DPS as a viable raiding spec. Shadow priests took front and center as the most popular and most important hybrid DPS support class in raids; while shadow priests DPS was not very close to what pure DPS classes could deal, they provided a very important resource back to healers and caster DPS: mana. The shadow priest returned mana to their party based on a percentage of their damage done.

The other hybrid DPS classes had a place as well in the new raiding machine, again not in terms of DPS throughput but by the buffs they brought to the raid to enhance the total overall DPS output of the rest of the raid:

* Feral Druid: DPS/Tank that could shift roles in combat and group wide critical strike buff (Leader of the Pack)
* Balance Druid: Melee hit boss debuff and group wide spell critical strike buff (Improved Faerie Fire and Moonkin Aura)
* Enhance Shaman: Melee group buffs (Windfury/Agility totem twisting and Bloodlust)
* Elemental Shaman: Caster group buffs (Totem of Wrath, Wrath of Air, and Bloodlust)
* Retribution Paladin: Group wide damage buff, boss debuffs: critical strike bonus, health/mana return (Sanctity Aura, Judgement's of Crusader, Light, and Wisdom)
* Protection Paladin: AoE tank that could hold threat on many targets simultaneously, Blessing of Sactuary

As an extension of the hybrid tax, feral druids and protection paladins, while viable tanks, were not the go to tank for Burning Crusade. Many of the encounters in the expansion were tuned for warrior tanks, and warriors alone possessed tools in their arsenals to counter specific encounter mechanics that would have left a paladin or druid out of luck (i.e. Reliquary of Souls’ Deaden, and Illidan’s Shear)

My Expectations for Cataclysm Raiding

2010-10-25T12:41:00.000-07:00

Basically, this is a Nostrodomus type post. I am not expecting these things to happen, but I think that Blizzard wants raiding to become more cerebral than it is currently and this is the roadmap that I have come up with based on what I have seen in the beta and what Blizzard is saying in blue posts. The game is severely lacking in depth at the moment and I think players are hungry again for a game that poses a challenge, instead of how fast I can hit my nuke button.

WOLK Summary

WOLK raiding has been characterized by fast paced, wham bam thank you ma'am type encounters that are completed pretty quickly. Enrage timers are generally 10 mins (LK 15mins, Halion 8mins both with very demanding DPS requirements) but fights are often done way before that. This twitch raiding model shifted focus away from the group effort and more on the player reacting and moving to avoid getting killed; raiding became less about coordination and more about how fast you could not stand in the poop.

Heroics, and trash are all about throwing as much AOE, and area damage at a group of mobs until everything dies, pull the next pack and repeat. While it is fun to just absolutely obliterate everything in a swirling vortex of rape, something can be said about methodically disabling and killing mobs. It is a lot of fun using all your abilities instead of just mashing your AOE nuke until you get your emblems, which is really the most boring thing I can think of, and one reason why I feel let down by WOLK.

Hard modes really helped give some depth to raiding and allowing more people to get into raiding. Call it catering to casuals, call it a paradigm shift or what have you, everyone has their labels. I call it a win, it let everyone play the game not just the people who raid 20 hours a week, and it was good to see that the large player base being able to take advantage of the content rather than subsidizing the raiders with their monthly fees. Being a hardcore raider, I didnt feel slighted in the least to know that noobs were seeing the same content I was.

I do scratch my head about how gear inflation got out of control in this expansion, and I see Blizzard taking dramatic steps to not allow stats to approach the crit and haste percentages that is common for every player. There is something broken if an averagely geared player is approaching things like haste and crit caps.

Looking forward to Cataclysm

As far as I can tell, Cataclysm raiding will be more of a slow burn instead of a gasoline fire. The days of the two shot tank, the 15 mob AOE trash pull, and the enrage timer will be artifacts of what raiding is going to become. I want to talk about how each of the three raiding Triforce elements (Tank, Healer, DPS) are going to evolve in the new raiding model, and then just a brief overview of raiding structure in general.

Tanks:

Sadly, I don't see a whole lot of changes coming to the tanking game. Stamina and Armor are becoming even more important than they are, and avoidance will be useful for mitigating damage in the long term rather than stopping the two-shot. Good tanks will be able to use their cool downs effectively, i.e. when healers need to move, or when they get into danger of dying; attacks that are capable of killing a tank will require cooldowns/movement and will most likely be broadcast well in advance so that the raid can coordinate. All tanks will have a block mechanic which will play a key role in making the healers mana stretch farther. Good tanks will be able to throttle their abilities in order to put more emphasis on survival or threat, depending on which is needed more; great tanks will be able to do both. Since crowd control is making a comeback, more skilled tanks will know which targets to leave alone and not break CC; pulls will be done more gingerly.

Healers:

The shift in the healer paradigm is the one I see as the most interesting change in Cataclysm. Healer mana will often be the key to success in any raid encounter. Healers who know how to maximize effective healing are going to be the ones who have the most success in the next expansion. The encounters will last as long as the healer's mana holds out. Once the healers go oom, then the fight will be over very shortly. Healers are going to have much lower mana regen, and much bigger mana pools, so that it acts as a soft enrage timer for an encounter.

More skilled healers will be able to use their mana intelligently. They will constantly be making decisions about who to heal and more importantly who not to heal. Keeping tanks alive is the first priority, other than that keeping everyone in the raid not dead is the next goal. Overhealing will matter again, it will show which healers are doing the best job and not squandering their mana. If a DPS dies in the fire, then the healers no longer need to feel guilty that they allowed him to die, as keeping that person alive would just waste their mana that they can't get back.

Healer coordination will separate the good guilds from the great guilds; the ability to cover a raid using everyone's skills will be enormous. Dispells will also become critical to the PVE game as the mana required must be calculated as to how much benefit a dispell will actually produce. A dispell that is performed early will be much more effective than a dispell done well after a debuff has dished out some damage. Also, a dispell may also be just a waste of mana entirely if healing the damage consumes less mana, the debuff isn't life threatening, or the DPS can heal themselves somehow. DPS self heals will matter.

Healers are becoming much less specialized in Cataclysm, but they still are retaining unique abilities that allow them to shine in certain situations. Paladins will be able to AOE heal, Druids will be effective tank healers, and so on but they will be their most potent when doing the things that they were designed to do. Healers also now have more than one speed. Healers can now do some damage in which that augments their healing abilities. This will be useful for fights where raid damage can be throttled, and healers can participate more in the fight rather than clicking on boxes.

DPS:

The goal of the DPS is to maximize damage output while not getting themselves killed. Preferably a DPS will place a high value on consuming the least of the healer's mana as possible. From what I have seen of the new talents and abilities, each DPS spec has the ability to heal themselves and/or mitigate incoming damage taken. Good DPS players will be expected to heal themselves to some degree via the use of First Aid, abilities/spells, potions, healthstones or any other avenue which can take the pressure off the healers. In general, DPS will be require to take a much greater responsibility for their own well being in comparison to previous expansions.

In general, better players are not simply measured by how much damage they deal, but by their ability to do more than just kill a boss. Great DPS players will also be able to incorporate their other abilities into their GCDs which will help the raid, such as paladins using hand spells, or priests using hymns as two examples. From what has been put out in the cataclysm beta, players aren't nearly as GCD locked as they once were, so they can afford to use these abilities to benefit the raid, or heal themselves for damage.

I see pure DPS classes coming back into the spotlight as we get further into the expansion. It seems less and less people are playing pure DPS classes simply because of the trade-off between performance and flexibility. Why roll a mage when a balance druid does just about the same amount of damage. The hybrid tax will enter the spotlight again, and pure DPS classes will once again shine on the meters. I don't see the Pure/Hybrid margin to come back in the magnitude of Vanilla and Burning Crusade, but 5% seems like a good place to start. Being a pure DPS should matter a lot more than just bringing raid buffs.

Hybrid DPS classes will have a place, but play a much larger role supporting the raid with dispells, off heals, and temporary buffs/debuffs rather than just focusing purely on damage output; hybrid classes can take some pressure off the healers and conserve their mana. Hybrid dispells seem to be crucial and I think we will see one or more encounters in the expansion that focuses on dispells from Hybrid DPS. The healing classes will be able to dispell magic debuffs exclusively, but poisons, diseases and curses can be dealt with by a hybrid. Hybrid CC will also play a big role in raiding.

Raiding in General

1) Easier initial bosses, harder final bosses. The first couple bosses should be puggable, but it will take a more coordinated effort to defeat the later bosses in a dungeon.

2) 10mans tougher than 25 mans. I'm calling this one right now. The only way to kill any debate that the 10man content is less viable than the 25man, is to overtune the 10man encounters not to mention the gear lag in Valor points that a team faces when doing 10man content.

3) Penalty of death much higher. Raider deaths are excusable for most raid encounters at present, simply because of the twitch nature of the fights and the movement involved which is affected by latency. Cataclysm raiding will be at a slower pace, not to mention most classes being able to heal them selves, and have higher health pools. If you die in a raid, you most likely did something incredibly stupid and your team will suffer for it. If you say that you died due to lag, I will stab you in the jaw.

4) Less complex loot systems. The mastery bonus will make armor less desirable by classes not sharing of that armor type, meaning rings, trinkets, weapons and jewelry will become more sought after. By concentrating the pool of desired loot, guilds wont need a broad complex system to allocate it all. Suicide Kings, EPGP will become more ideal ways of allocating loot.

5) Broadening the guild skill range. Currently there is a very black and white view of how good your guild is, either it is good or bad. By adding complexity to the class and raiding environment we will begin to see a more broad range of the skill of guilds, not just are you an 11/12 HM guild or a 12/12 HM guild.

Men and Sex

2010-06-30T12:11:00.000-07:00

In my futile attempts to understand the sexes, I came up with the following hypothesis: All men desire from women is sex. Yea I know it is cliche but think about it.

Men can provide for themselves materially, and can maintain a home, feed themselves and (hopefully) clean up after themselves.
Men are more stable emotionally, and can subside without a woman to be dependent on.
Men are direct and straightforward, and are more adept to solve problems.

The only thing a man cannot provide for himself is sex.

Blah blah I'm a sexist, and don't really know anything deeper about woman. I am not claiming to be right, just doing a thought experiment.

This just makes me think more about traditional gender roles. There is a good quote "Men can build a house, but only a woman can build a home". There is truth in that, but it still makes me think that sex is the only thing women have to offer, and sadly it becomes a bargaining chip in order to get a man who can provide for them.

It might be just me.

On Expectations

2010-06-17T09:24:00.000-07:00

I wish I had an insightful quote to start this thing off, but sadly all I can think of is "I wish, I wish, I hadn't killed that fish"

The weird thing about interacting with people is that there is an anticipation or a preconception about who person A expects of person B. No matter if people have just met, or have known each other for a long time, your expectations are hastily put together and forced on someone else. I can walk down the street and see a dude in gangbanger clothes, and I can expect that he is probably someone I don't want to mess with, or he is peacocking to let everyone else around him know that he is.

This behavior is useful, because it helps our brains sort out the people who are dangerous, and the people whom we want to be associated with. Your brain can sort out all the things you come across in a day and tell you what to avoid. This can be useful, but I would argue that in the society of today this behavior is constantly on overdrive and is blind to the nuanced nature of how people express themselves.

I thought I was the person that Erin wanted to be with. I expected things to work going forward, given the fact that our relationship has been awesome in the past. She needs more than I am capable of giving, or want to give.

I either don't understand this, or it is a paradox which is incapable of a solution. I feel that she needs more attention from me, yet she wants time to herself. She want's to explore and go out and see things, yet I put myself in her hands to go wherever she wants and nothing comes of it. For now I am chalking it up to us not being right for eachother.

Things have not been right for a very long time. My trust of her has been slowly diminishing over time, and now it is at the point where I can't love her anymore because she hasn't given her love to me.

I just feel like a worthless lame nerd who spends far too much of his time playing video games with other nerds, children, and some people who aren't content with the accomplishment in their lives. People that seek absolution in a virtual world filled with weapons, armor, and dragons to ride on. Erin knew this about me going into our engagement, but perhaps she had the expectation that I would lose interest in this game eventually.

There was a time where I would have thrown it all away just to be with her. I would ask her if I needed to stop playing in order to spend more time with her, but the answer was always that she liked knowing that there would be time for her to have to herself. Now I know she would spend that time with the other men in her life. Fuck me for being such a stupid lame nerd.

I am a lame nerd though. It's who I am, and who I want to be. I like geeking out about math and science. I like playing video games. I have accomplished things in my life that I am proud of. I have a masters degree in EE, and I can sort of speak another language.

I know I am smart, funny and charming. I know that I am an asshole, jaded, and overall disappointed in a lot of the humans on the planet. I'm humble and softspoken. I really don't care about the human race as a whole, but I care deeply for the people I meet everyday. I would rather make one person happy who is local to me than feed a starving baby with aids in China, whether that is the cashier at the grocery store or my own mom.

Erin and I had expectations of each other going into this marriage that I guess the other person just couldn't meet. I expected a lot more from Erin in the bedroom, but I know now that she stopped being attracted to me a long time ago. I expected that she would follow through with her plans to go to law school, or get another job, or get healthy and in shape, or do all the things that she wants to do with her life. Things that I want to be a part of. All of these things that she wants for herself are things that I am unable to give her. We both want each other to be happy and we want to do whatever will make that other person happy. I can't give her the discipline that she needs to make herself happy, ergo I can't give her anything to make her happy.

Erin has been dependent on other people all her life. Well, dependent might not be the right word, but it seems that she has always had someone to rely on whether it be emotionally, monetarily, or what have you. Erin doesn't like who she is. She wants to be more like other people. She craves it. Gretchen is a wonderful lady, and a saint in my book, but Erin depends too much on her mom. Erin is afraid of the world, and every time things get fucked up, Gretchen will bear the load.

I am not trying to absolve myself from responsibility. Looking back, I would have pressed Erin more (ha) about her relationship with Mike, and Trevor, and Leo. I would have seen that Erin needs to explore and push boundaries, where I am content to be in the boundaries I have defined for myself, and simply explore them fully before finding new ones. Erin needs constant external stimulus. She sought these other men out and got what she was unable to get from me. It just really makes me feel inadequate. I have convinced myself that there has been some tomfoolery going on between her and at least one other.

Erin is bad in bed. Even when she is on top of her game, she still can't fully satisfy. Maybe I am just pissed off at her recent lay there and do nothing sack sessions, but I think this is valid. She is an incredibly selfish lover. Being intimate with someone is where I dest display my affections for someone. I want to make the other person feel loved and secure.

It all comes back to expectations. That primate instinct in my brain expected things that I did not communicate, and Erin's brain did the same thing. Now it comes down to brass tacks. Are we willing to give the other person what they need to proceed in this relationship? Based solely on the fact that Erin is unattracted to me speaks volumes. I could help her love herself and in time she could love me again, but that would take far too much time than I am willing to commit to someone I feel has taken me for granted.

I blame us both for this relationship falling apart. I blame her more than I blame myself, simply because Erin has not been honest with herself for a lot of the relationship. She clung to it, cursing me the whole time about why I couldn't be better, or why she didn't deserve me, or fooling herself that I was the stable rock that she needed when someone more flavor of the month would have been better. Erin has a lot of love for the people that she has been with in the past, and she still keeps that with her. I don't think I will be any different. Maybe someday she will have enough ex loves that she will finally decide to drop all her baggage with past men and love someone else truly. She needs to love herself.

Blizzard's Perfect (Shit)Storm

2010-06-14T10:35:00.000-07:00

So, Blizzard announced this weekend that they are cutting previously announced features from Cataclysm; the most notable of these are Path of the Titans, and Guild Leveling/Currency. As I can recall, Path of the Titans was an alternate way to progress your toon once it hit the level cap other than doing PVE and PVP content, in addition to augmenting your character's stats and/or capabilities in PVE/PVP. This would intersect with the new Archeology secondary profession and let people get really into the lore of the warcraft universe.

Guild leveling would allow guilds to generate experience by doing raids, instances, battlegrounds, and achievements in order to make the guild a stronger entity. This would include a guild talent tree where points could be spent in order to increase proficiency at whatever the guild's goals were oriented towards.

These cuts feel like the removal of something that would make the game feel new and fresh again. Cataclysm seems like it is going to be more of the same. The developers are streamlining raiding with unified 10/25 raid ID lockouts, gear and talents are getting streamlined, and I don't see many new raid mechanics coming down the pipeline (but I could be wrong). A lot of the complexity, for better or worse, that exists right now is being taken out of the game.

I was really hoping that Path of the Titans would breathe some fresh air into the game and give the game something new to replace what is being removed. Even if it resembles a Farmville type (Do something, wait a bit, get reward, do something else) system, it would still be a little more fun than the current raiding environment. I am still pulling for Archaeology to add this type of randomness to a game that is getting more and more formulaic.

I can dig the new talent trees, but I still think they look too much like WOLK trees. I guess the huge shakeups from Vanilla -> BC -> WOLK in the talents have put me in a position to expect more. I might also be biased that I am comparing the trees that I play as alts and the Paladin tree might just get completely upended.

Behind all this it seems like Blizzard has overextended itself. It tried really hard to be all things to all people, and for that it has succeeded. Blizzard wants this game out by the end of the year, and it probably needed to cut what it did in order to make that deadline. The price that was paid was fun. I really think WoW is going to suffer from Activision syndrome this next expansion. They know what works, and they are going to keep milking that cow until the milk sucks. I fear that Cataclysm is going to drive off a lot of the veterans, and the WOLK babies are going to get what they have always gotten.

These cuts needed to happen. If the game goes for much longer without new life breathed into it, people are going to leave in droves. If we have to keep farming ICC until say march of next year and we ended up getting the Path and Guild features, I don't think the influx of people would offset how many people would leave. It is a numbers game at this point and they have too many people invested to take that chance. I would say that half the player has gear addiction and needs their fix.

The Cataclysm WoW population is going to be a cess pool of people of whiny jerks who are only in it to use each other to get better gear, pretty much what the LFD has become. I am leveling a bear druid through LFD and I have done dungeons where I nobody says a word throughout the entire thing. Everyone in the dungeon has shut down the higher functions of their brain and tries to get through it as quickly as possible, so they can get their gear.

This is a little tangential but it is an example of this behavior. Guitar Hero 1 was arguably the best game in the franchise in my opinion. It had personality, challenge and it was something fresh and new among all the platformers and sports games, and shooters. None of the music was licensed, it was all covers and they sounded good. I would argue that some of the appeal in the game was the covered music because it let the player get into the game more by knowing they weren't trying to be the stars who wrote the songs, they were just pretending. It didn't take itself too seriously, and it was a labor of love for the developers. All in it cost over 100 bucks to buy the thing and it still flew off shelves, cause it was something new and fun. Guitar hero today is just formulaic, homogenized and streamlined. Sound familiar?

The Big Crits crew are all amazing people, and right now it is because of them that I am probably going to keep playing. Getting H-LK down and getting people their drakes, no matter how futile it seems is what is driving me still.

Okay time for a nap for this old man. Gotta get my energy up to yell at those damn kids.

Healers in Cataclysm

2010-06-10T07:13:00.000-07:00

It looks like Blizzard is going to give healers something to do rather than react to raid damage in Cataclysm. I am looking at the sneak peak at the released talent trees and I see some suspicious talents that convert damage into healing.

Priest:
Penitence (3 ranks) - Increases the critical effect chance of your Smite and Penance spells by 5/10/15%.
Atonement (3 ranks) - When you deal damage with Smite, you instantly heal a nearby low-health friendly target within 40 yards equal to 15/30/45% of the damage dealt.
Evangelism (2 ranks available) - When you cast Smite you gain Evangelism, increasing the damage done by your Smite, Holy Fire, Holy Nova and Penance spells by 2/4% and reducing the mana cost of those spells by 3/6% for 15 seconds. Stacks up to 5 times.
Archangel (1 rank available) - Consumes your Evangelism effects, instantly restoring 3% of your total mana and increasing your healing done by 3% for each stack. Also allows you to channel Penance while moving. Lasts 18 seconds.
Divine Accuracy (2 ranks available) - Increases the chance to hit with your Smite, Holy Fire, Holy Nova and Penance spells by 10/20%.

These might be aimed at PvP, but it looks like Priests might become shockadin types with a smart heal attatched. We will see, but this looks interesting in terms of the direction Blizzard is taking with Priests: heal when things are frantic, DPS when things are boring.

Shaman don't get as big a toolbox as Priests.

Shaman:

Focused Insight (5 ranks available) - After casting any shock spell, your next heal's mana cost is reduced by 15/30/45/60/75% of the cost of the shock spell, and its healing effectiveness is increased by 5/10/15/20/25%.

Druids also don't get the same breadth of tools as Priests.

Druid:

Fury of a Stormrage (3 points) - You have a 5/10/15% chance when you cast Nourish or Healing Touch to cause your next Wrath spell to be instant cast and cost no mana. Fury of Stormrage lasts for 8 seconds.

So, it looks to me like Blizzard is trying to make healing more dynamic in that you can heal and DPS at the same time either via boredom or skill. If two healers applicants look really evenly matched in their healing output, a little DPS could tip the scales in favor of the better player. The shaman shock mechanic looks a little weak sauce, but I'm sure it will get retuned, unless they adjust the coefficients on Shaman shock spells to make them hit a lot harder.

As an aside, it seems that all the released trees have a damage reduction talent in reach of all three specs. Is this a sign that raid damage will matter a lot more as healers fight to keep their blue bar at least partially filled?

The audacity of Earth

2010-05-20T09:06:00.000-07:00

I have a plant outside my office. Well, I didn't put it there but since I have the closest proximity to it, I call dibs. It is starting to get pretty big, and it has been a while since the plant lady trimmed it. I am starting to hit it with my head as I walk to the get a drink, go to the bathroom, or go talk to my boss. The nerve. This plant had better learn a thing or two or I just might trim it myself.

If you are an inferior species, your choices are adapt or die. This plant better adapt and quick or it will lose a limb. I just might have to forbid it be watered as well. That will teach it a thing 'er two.

Heck, the planet itself had better watch it's step. Homo Sapiens are the dominant species now. We can dictate pretty much whatever we want to thanks to science and technology. We can extract food, heat, and whatever material need we can imagine out of the Earth. We have adapted, and we have grown dominant. For too long, people have been oppressed by the planet and have had to struggle and scrap for everything we have out of constant oppression. It's time the planet learned a thing er' two. It's Earth's turn to adapt or die.

Reckoning

2010-05-18T07:27:00.000-07:00

Reckoning has gotten a very bad reputation since the days of BC, and especially after the first Reck bomb. Right now it is opposite of useful if you are a protection paladin, even if it was a 1 point talent. A white hit + seal proc is not a ton of damage or threat, and more white hits mean more parry opportunities for less threat and more incoming damage; granted there are like 2 bosses in ICC that parry haste, but I want to get away from that model and parrys should actually mean something in the future. Here is reckoning in it's current form:

Reckoning (5 talent points? WTF?!?)
Gives you a 2/4/6/8/10% chance after blocking or being hit by any damaging attack that the next 4 weapon swings within 8 sec will generate an additional attack.

Since reckoning is an offensive ability at it's core, it seems that it's proper place is in the Ret tree. I have grown fond of the 2PC T10 and I want to keep some randomness in the Ret Paladin rotation. Plus, Ghostcrawler and the dev team seem to be loving the idea of "Fun" abilities woven into our rotations based on procs and random crap that might happen in your rotation. In that spirit, I propose the new Reckoning:

Reckoning (3 talent points)
Your melee critical strikes have a 5%/10%/15% chance to allow you to cast a Hammer of Wrath within 10 seconds, but at twice the mana cost.

The mana cost thing is in there just to give the player a downside to the ability. If you spam it too much, you will run out of mana, or good players can regulate their mana and still have fun and do great DPS. It also allows the paladin some sort of ranged attack, potentially to keep pressure on a healer in PVP, or hit another target. Maybe even:

Improved Hammer of Wrath: (2 or 3 talent points based on balance)
Your Hammer of Wrath will now strike 1/2/3 additional targets within 15 yards, but each hit strikes at 75%/66%/50% damage.

Just something like this would add a lot of fun to the game for Ret pallies, and also potentially make the glyph a little more useful. For me especially, I like the randomness of an extra divine storm, but without the GCD locking that currently happens. Heck, right now Hammer of Wrath hardly makes it into my rotation due to it hitting like a rubber mallet. Come back and talk to me when it procs a seal.

I don't think this would make paladins overpowered again in PVP, although I wouldn't mind a little padding since I am terrible in Battlegrounds . It would also mix up PVE a lot in addition to filling in the flavor of this next expansion, "The Fun Button"

It also seems useful but optional. This wouldn't be terribly useful for single target fights. It also is very dangerous in the hands of a noob, as trash and heroics aren't going to be the AOE fests as Wrath is currently, and it will make the clcRET users have to think a little before mashing that next shiny button, which even I am guilty of most times.

I want to see dual spec become useful for Ret pallies as well. You have one spec for single target DPS, and one for utility/multiple target fights. If I want to tank or heal, there should be more of an opportunity cost involved than casting for 10 seconds. I should have to leave the instance, see the trainer, and buy glyphs.

P.S. Yes I saw the Tankspot post about fixed game mechanics. Yes I remember vividly the Reck bomb video. Yes I went half mast.

Ranty McRantrant

2010-05-04T11:55:00.000-07:00

Crushadin said: "Jack quit... sry i didnt let you know."

I am not surprised in so many ways:

-Being a friend of an officer and apping to the guild for a raiding spot.
-Acting like a cock to me and others on the forums.
-Switching mains.
-Failing in every way on Herioc Dreamwalker.
-Vanishing without a trace.

My Gamer Bio

2010-04-29T10:02:00.000-07:00

If you read this, and haven't seen the first episode of Big Crits go check it out: www.bigcrits.com

The featured raiders at Big Crits are all being asked to do a self bio to give people who watch the show an idea of who they are as gamers. I don't know whether this is to communicate to the viewers that the players are people, or to plunk down their phat gaming resume.

For some reason, gamers can be a very discerning breed when presented with a gamer peer. We immediately size them up based on their pedigree and/or gaming preferences. I have heard more of my share of gamers sneer when someone presents that they play Wii, Farmville, or whatever the casual flavor of the month is.

Gamers are gamers are gamers. Whether you grew up playing Magic: The Gathering, SNES, or frisbee golf, there is a spirit common to everyone one way or another that it is all about playing and having fun. If anyone wants to play, go play with em.

That being said, I want to share my bio.

As long as I can remember, there have been video games. Being a youngin' I can remember the allure of arcade games and knowing friends with these things called computers and Ataris. If I could manage to find a quarter, or get one from my parents, I think it found a home in the nearest arcade cabinet. The NES was my gateway drug: Super Mario 3, Megaman 2&3, Battletoads, then to the Sega Genesis, N64, and stopping at the PC Games, with a minor detour playing games on Macs (my dad is a little of an apple fanboy.)

My little brother and I were fiends at whatever game came our way. It's hard to say it but he is a much better gamer than me, even though I spend vastly more time playing than him. Any type of competetive game we played I think he won more than I did. Marathon deathmatches, Doom, Command and Conquer, Starcraft, Goldeneye 007; we hashed it out on em all, and any given day I think he could best me.

Consoles sparked my interest but PC games fueled the fire. I still game on consoles a bit, but there is nothing more satisfying than playing PC games on a rig you built yourself. Not only that, but Emulators and ROMs got me through many summers of boredom. I got caught up on SNES JRPGs, Super Metriod, and other games I missed by having a Sega as a kid. You can play a lot of free stuff that you can find if you look hard enough. Super Mario RPG was my unicorn though; I don't think I ever found a working ROM for many years, and when I finally found one, we were playing Baldur's Gate II and KOTOR, and it didn't quite stand up.

I remember resisting playing WoW for a very long time. I knew it would be fun and good, but the concept of paying a monthly fee to play a game seemed foreign to me; after all, I got through college playing cracked PC games because I was poor and had bandwidth. I started playing about a month or so after I split with my first fiancee, when some roommates of mine introduced me to it and hooked me up with a trial key. This was back in May 2006.

Saltycracker will be my first and only I think. I leveled him from 1-60 in around 15 days of playtime, but quickly got bored because there was not much to do for a retnoob at 60. BC came and I went Holy then Ret then Prot and cleared everything. Wrath came and I tanked and ansgted through T8, where I went back Ret and now roll my face with the best of em.

Being an electrical engineer I still dabble in consoles a bit, but I find more fun breaking them and modding them than actually playing some of the games. I gave my little brother a chipped Xbox with a ton of roms on it for christmas five years ago and he says it's the best gift he ever got; I had to replace the hard drive in it recently because it wore out. I currently live in Denver, Colorado and am extremely lucky to have a great friend and fiancee Erin. We are getting married in December in New Mexico.

I got gonged and I liked it.

2010-03-19T21:11:00.000-07:00

Gong Show took me in, gave me some loot and then shat me back out. Although I thought I did an acceptable job as a DPS paladin, they thought otherwise. Halfway through my trial, another paladin came in and eventually took my raid spot after about 3 bosses worth, and I thought he was a friend of an officer but I could be wrong. It was a pretty shady transition and after talking with the other paladin. I guess he applied to GS before I did, but couldn't join because he still wanted to raid with his previous guild. He had better gear than I did before I joined, and did more DPS than me on those few encounters, but not by a very big margin. My exodus from the guild may not have been entirely performance based, especially since these world ranked guild go through recruits like kleenex.

Gong show keeps a thread where raid members make comments about your raid performance, and here is how mine read:

Poor communication skills
Popped tons of ghosts on DW
Pulled aggro on beasts on Saurfang
Got hit by an extra block on Sind p3
Almost faceplanted an orange slime on a Putricide hard attempt and said he was fine when I asked him about it because he had rocket boots
Pretty bad at princes
Overall just dies a lot to random shit it seems, and a ret should be able to pull a little bit better numbers

Any criticism is good criticism so let's break this down.

-Poor communication skills.

I am still scratching my head about what this means, but I think this means in raid communication, i.e. raid chat and vent chat. I started to speak more towards the end of my trial as opposed to the beginning, but that's how it goes when you join any guild.

-Popped tons of ghosts on Lady Deathwhisper (HM).

Tons of ghosts apparently means 1 per attempt, and just as much as the other melee were failing on them. Granted recruits are under a microscope, but if it is happening as much as the other member melee, isn't the bar set there?

-Saurfang Beasts.

There is a bug where if you have Avenging Wrath active, it will bypass the AOE reduction buff that the beasts get. My AW buff was expiring heading into the beasts phase and I got hit by a blood beast, which in Hard Mode is a big deal; the raid is trying very hard to starve Saurfang of runic power in any way possible (BoPs on boiling blood raiders, tight taunt transitions, efficient killing of blood beasts.)

-Got hit with extra ice block on Sindragosa P3 (HM)

I never ever ever got hit with an extra block unless we were already wiping. In fact I never died to a phase 2 ice bomb, or screwed up a block position. I am scratching my head on this one as well.

-Orange Slime (Putricide HM)

This one aggravates me more than any other. I was trying my best to be proactive at killing the orange slime when the raid leader says he wants some initial damage on the ooze, and I had the foresight to use my rocket boots if the ooze picked me to chase. It did, I did. Is wiping to a bomb going off a more preferable option than using a cooldown to prevent it?

-Pretty bad at Princes (HM)

Guilty. It took me a few kills to get this one right. Shadow Prison is pretty tricky especially when there is nowhere to go when a non-empowered shock vortex goes off in the middle of the raid, or when all the melee gets a movement speed debuff right before an empowered one; this formula equals a huge pile of melee corpses and usually the ranged had to finish off the fight.

-Overall just dies to a lot of random stuff

I don't think I died any more than anyone else during attempts. The only two preventable deaths I could think of are:

1. Standing too close to the choking gas bombs a couple times when they went off

2. Vile spirit spawning right on top of the melee, waiting about 5 seconds before using any sort of AOE and promptly getting punched in the face. 5 seconds is more than enough time for a misdirect or a taunt.

-Low DPS

I was consistently in the top 5 in fights where you had to stand still and kill stuff, just what DPS paladins are good for; we have a severe penalty for switching targets. Fights where target changes happen often (LDW, Putricide, Blood Princes) I was usually hanging in the low middle range of the other melee in the raid.

Taking this criticism for what it is worth, I know where I need to improve. I also know how thin the line is between acceptable and unacceptable mistakes in world class raiding guilds. Part learning curve, part raw deal. GLHF Siqwence.

Posting topics

2010-03-17T11:37:00.000-07:00

My brain is full and I want to put some of this in the cloud.

-Getting kicked out of Gong Show
-New Guild - Big Crits!
-Economy WTF
-US political system
-Entitlement inside and out of WoW
-The aversion to original ideas or why the remake/reboot is so comforting.

More as I get time to write.

The End?

2010-02-15T10:36:00.001-08:00

My old raid guild died. Eden. It was a super fun place to raid with amazing cool people, but the management just fell apart. Kudos to Serenity, and her husband but in the end they created a place that needed infinite upkeep from them and it was too much to handle. I guess they brought it on themselves with a complex set of policies from everything to recruitment, gear audits, four DKP systems, scheduling each and every raider to each raid ahead of time, and even a policy of how to logout to Eden standards. Pretty damn anal, but to each their own. I applaud them for realizing they needed to shed the yoke while they had the chance, even if it meant that all their raiders would no longer have a home.

My new guild, Gong Show is pretty awesome too. The players are great, and they are very knowledgeable and skilled. I like to think of myself as a good player knowing strats, knowing how to gear, spec, gem, play, be aware, and all of the things that a good raider should be, but I am still learning stuff from these guys. Great fun.

The raid/guild leader is really impressive as well. He knows the fine line of positive and negative reinforcement very well and can motivate the raid very effectively, which is great considering he content we are learning (Heroic Putricide is going to eat shit tonight)

I really hope we kill Lich King on heroic soon, and I want to give everything I can to ensure that we do. 5 nights a week sounds a lot more fun that it is, and I really would rather be doing something with Erin on a few of those nights, but once farming hits 2 nights is all I would really like to spend doing this crap. Even then I will just be feeding Blizzard just to grind.

I think my time with this game is getting close to done. I don't agree with Blizzard's current model of providing content. I don't like this expansion at all, with the exception of Ulduar and Icecrown. Everything else has just been a loot padded house of farts. The only conflict I have right now is a sense of loyalty to the guild I play with. They brought me in and I feel that I owe them a debt that I need to repay by being useful to them. For now I want to help them get to the end goal, Arthas.

I guess the game has been challenging up until now because I have been trying to carve out a place for a Ret paladin in the grand scheme of things, and I feel like I have accomplished this. Not that I have single handedly accomplished this task, but that I have shown the people I have played with that Paladins can do as good or if not better than any pure DPS class. Ret paladins are accepted now and people realize their usefulness and have been accepted into the mind of a raid leader instead of shoehorned in by Blizzard because of the buffs they provide. PUGS can look for a DPS and a paladin can stand on their own feet.

Blizzard's WOLK formula is starting to show it's age, and I think Cataclysm will be a bandaid. It was a slippery slope shoveling gear down people's throats so that they can experience the content. The gear is why a lot of people played, to see how much they could perform and be able to upgrade their performance with better numbers. Now, people have the expectation of easy gear, and when it finally reaches the parity where everyone has the same gear as everyone else through nerfing and retooling, subscriptions will plummet.

It is the paradox of homogenation. I felt a sting when I learned that the uniqueness of my class was going to be shared with everyone else with the raid buff changes that accompanied WOLK. I understand why it was done and I enjoy not having to seek a elusive 1 raid member to make the raid machine perform. Nonetheless, this meant that raid members and classes were now interchangeable to a degree and some classes were at a comparative (dis)advantage. With the gear and stat changes coming with Cataclysm, it feels like more of the same. Blizzard is going to shoehorn you into the stats they think you should be using and leave no wiggle room in terms of how you gear.

I might be eating my words when I see the final changes (Talent tree overhauls, new mechanics, etc.) but I feel the same sting coming. My question to myself is, do I want to keep funding this type of homogenization, or swallow my concerns and have marginally less fun. Time will tell.

Chinese Food

2010-01-27T07:39:00.000-08:00

Jill likes chinese food. It's not something that she could eat everyday, but I don't think I could either for an extended period of time. I am pretty sure that I like chinese food more than Jill, which leaves me wanting sometimes when I want some good chinese food, but Jill doesn't find it all that appetizing. I also find that when I ask Jill what she would like, she hardly ever mentions that she wants chinese.

Jill's temperament is also very finicky when it comes to eating chinese; sometimes she doesn't feel well, sometimes it's too late to eat chinese, and sometimes the chinese isnt very good and that will put her off about eating it at a later time. We both know that I like chinese, 2-3 times a week would be my preference and then trying different dishes and flavors as well. I definitely have my dish preferences, but sometimes I like to deviate and find something new to try.

Jill knows I like chinese, and she can empathize when we haven't eaten it in a while and knows that I miss eating chinese. If anyone is denied something they want for an extended period of time for no identifiable reason, I think their moods become significantly affected. Mine is no different. I get moody and bitchy if a lot of time goes by where chinese isn't a part of my day.

I can't blame Jill for not wanting chinese with me. I could go get chinese by myself, and it might be nice to eat alone, but that isn't a long term solution as I like sharing chinese with Jill. If I ate alone, I would have to be discrete about it, because I don't think Jill would like the idea of me having chinese without her. I think she would feel bad because she doesn't enjoy chinese as much as I do.

I want there to be a solution where I don't simply want chinese food less, or Jill must force herself have chinese just to make me happy. I wonder if I just have a lot of bad chinese food, then I will not want to have it as much.

I don't think I am helping the situation at all by playing WoW three nights a week with my buddies. I come home, have about an hour to eat and talk, and then play late. There isn't enough time on those days to have chinese and enjoy it with someone else. When Jill wants chinese, there needs to be time devoted to it, and it can't be rushed. It is a meal to be enjoyed, and eaten together.

I feel like I have put myself in an impossible situation, wanting something that I am unwilling to commit time towards. Three nights a week are locked out from having chinese, which leaves four days left in the week. I could have chinese all of those days, but it is a crap shoot if Jill feels the same, and with her tolerance for chinese there comes maybe one day in those four that chinese actually might present itself as an option.

Posting more.

2010-01-22T15:08:00.001-08:00

I just use my blog mainly as a springboard to all the other ones I am watching, but something postworthy happens once in a while.

I decided to go into work late, so I could sell my TV to some guy after work. Rather than get up and do something productive, I think I made a conscious choice to stay in bed and dream. Not because I was tired, but because my dream felt like it wasn't being dreamt to it's satisfaction.

I had a dream where I was floating around a city. It was a very urban place like Paris or NYC. It was me going home after work, through a crowded market, a plaza, up and down stairs, just kind of cool. I got home and immediately my conciousness was transferred to another person, who then started the trip in reverse, and a slightly different route. This dream has happened a few times and I want it to return so I can examine this place closer.

I also had an idea for a short story the other day. A person that celebrates the birth of every day, and mourns the death of every day.

Tanks Side by Side

2009-05-15T10:48:00.001-07:00

I will break down each tank individually in time but I need to understand them first. I have a pretty good idea on Paladin and Warrior tanking and their pro's and con's. DKs and Druids I have very little knowledge about how a 3.1 tank works let alone the in's and outs.

I made a little chart weighing the strengths and weaknesses of the four classes in several catagories:

Damage Mitigation: The more damage you can avoid taking, the better it is for your healers, and you will stay alive longer. This is typically melee damage. Paladin's typically take the least damage overall with blocks and high armor. Druids and Warriors take similar amounts of incoming damage depending on the uptime of a druid's Savage Defense; Druids have higher armor, so I would assume their damage intake will be lower. DK's are made to be avoidance tanks, so they will get hit harder when attacks land as they typically have less armor than the other classes.

Total Health: The more health you have, the bigger hits you can take before you die. This stat is most useful for bosses who deal large blows very slowly. After 3.1 DK's and Druids got big HP nerfs but they still have the largest health pools of all the tanks. Paladins are next since their stam coefficient is higher than Warriors.

Avoidance: How often the boss Misses/Dodges/Parrys when he tries to attack you. Avoidance is typically a secondary category to gear for as it is based on random chance. If you fail to avoid several attacks in a row, this could end up killing you if you cannot mitigate the damage or if the incoming damage is more than your total HP. DK's win this round, followed by Druids with their crazy high dodge rate. Paladin's typically have more avoidance than warriors ceteris paribus as agility gives us more dodge than warriors, although I don't see much plate with agility on it. I need to get some data for the warrior/pally avoidance.

Cooldowns: If you can use cooldowns to prevent/mitigate a large incoming attack, the less likely you are going to die. The more cooldowns you can use, the better your chances of surviving. Warriors have some of everything including their buffed shield block. DK's have short cooldown but potent abilities, which edges them out against warriors. Druids have a couple tricks. Paladins have one talent, with one glyphed not as good cooldown (Hand of Salvation).

AOE Tanking: Sometime or another you will need to tank more than one angry at a time. This may be 2, or may be 20. The less GCD's you need to use to keep them under control, and not get eaten by them, the better. Paladins shine in this category as we take less damage from many angrys beating on us while maintaining threat. DKs have very good/best AoE threat, but take more damage due to being avoidance tanks with not as much armor. Druids have swipe spam, and can take less damage with higher armor. Warriors have a lot more going for them in terms of AoE tanking than they used to including Damage Shield, Shockwave(Long CD), TClap, as well as Deep Wounds on crits (Thanks Warriors for the info)

Threat: The tank needs to be the most threatening person in the raid to an angry. If you cannot keep more threat than the DPS, they will be taking hits instead of you. Paladins have the highest threat due to our threat abilities being magical in nature and not mitigated with boss armor. DKs have some magic damage, Druid/Warriors bleed which is reduced by armor.

Moblility: A tank needs to be able to intercept incoming new angrys as well as get away from bosses when they become too dangerous to tank. The ranking is very tough as each class excells in a various movement type. Warriors take this one as they can charge angrys and friendly players. Druids have have the ability to charge. Paladins and DKs have passive run speed talents; DKs can also bring angrys to them instead of intercepting them.

Raid Assistance/Buffs: Some tanks bring raid buffs and can cast spells to assist your raid in completing your tasks better. Paladins edge out warriors as we have Hands of XYZ, Divine Sacrifice, and BoSanc. Warriors can Intervene, Sunder Armor, Vigilance, and have a few more tricks to help out the raid (Shouts etc). Druids have a buff (MotW, Leader of the Pack), and DKs do very little to provide additional raid support.

Hopefully those categories are sufficient to rate how well your tank performs. I will be updating this table as I research more about the abilities of other classes.

What's in a Tank?

2009-05-12T09:54:00.000-07:00

So, Blizzard has given us four flavors of tanking other than gimicky encounters that have mages/locks/hunters soak damage. We have Death Knights, Druids, Paladins (yay), and Warriors. The next few posts will be commentary on the styles of each tank and where their strengths and weaknesses lie. I will also be posting on how these tanks interact with boss encounters in Ulduar. Each will be prefaced with a brief overview. For a more compresensive look at each tank, there are lots of resources found online which get into fine detail about the nuances. Elitist Jerks forums are some of my favorite places to go when I need maths.

Since I know Paladins the best, let's start there.

Paladins are tanks that rely on plate armor, and a huge damn shield to mitigate damage. We utilize Righteous Fury in concert with holy damage in order to generate threat. We have several ablities to use to generate threat: Judgement, Hammer of the Righteous, Shield of the Righteous, Holy Shield, Consecration, Avenger's Shield, and Exorcism. The first five are used in the basic 969 rotation, and the last two are great for ranged pulling of mobs. Paladins have two taunts in their arsenals as well, single targets with Hand of Reckoning and up to three targets (shotgun taunt) Righteous Defense.

The general philosophy behind paladin tanking is rely on your shield for damage mitigation whether it be single target or AoE tanking. Paladins excel at taking a steady intake of damage with each attack blocking a good chunk of the incoming damage using Holy Shield; more steady and predictable damage means that there is less pressure on the healers as healing you is generally easier.

Generally paladins do not have as many "Oh Sh*t" buttons as the other tanking classes, but that is the trade off for our ability to soak steady damage. Paladins in general have one damage reduction cooldown: Divine Protection. Basically a carbon copy of the Warrior's Shield Wall (50% damage reduction for 10 sec). We can glyph for a 20% reduction effect to Hand of Salvation, but this has a dangerous downside for threat sensitive fights. We don't get a Last Stand, or a Frenzied Regeneration type cooldown. A paladin tank can compensate with healer cooldowns, like Pain Suppression, Guardian Spirit, or Divine Sacrifice but these can't be always relied upon.

I would argue that paladin tanks take less damage than any other tank, but handle spike damage very poorly. Fight's like Loetheb, General Vezax, and any other boss that deals steady damage are ideal for a paladin tank.

Another strength of paladin tanks is AoE tanking. We have some of the best multi-target threat abilities in the game and when you couple that with the ability to block a good chunk of every incoming attack, AoE tanking becomes the hallmark of tankadins. Often it is better to put a tankadin on boss adds than bosses due to their ease in dealing with multiple enemies.

That's it for now, next up Warriors.

I want three specs =P

2009-05-05T08:09:00.000-07:00

Quick Post:

1) Main Tank Spec for guild progression - 80% of the time I am tanking Ulduar progression

2) PVP Spec. Prot is actually really fun in arenas. - 15% of the time

3) PVE Ret offspec. 5% There are some bosses in Ulduar that really truly only need one tank.

Respec's arent expensive. I used to blow 250g a night in sunwell in respeccing, when that was a lot of money (back in my day....) I have just fallen in love with hotswapping specs and having my bars good to go. It makes life so much easier. Glyphs however are pretty expensive and usually cost more than the respec.

Ulduar Dificulty Adjustments

2009-05-01T08:24:00.000-07:00

Looking at how Blizzard is "nerfing" Ulduar makes me giggle a little bit. There are open flame wars on our realm forums and everywhere with everyone claiming bigger E-Peens than everyone else because they downed the content before Blizzard nerfed it. I don't think it matters but when a new raid is released, I have belief that the difficulty is released on a sliding scale. Blizzard may claim the contrary and say that the polish was missing on some of the encounters, which is also very valid. Some fixes are bugs and some are much needed tuning. The raid difficulty is put in place as a barrier from guilds demolishing the place in a single night. A raid has a lifespan of about 6 months before your raiders have everything they could really want from the place and are chomping at the bit for some new content.

In my mind there are three types of raiding guilds: Top 100, Top 1000 and everyone else (EE).

Top 100 guilds are not necessarily the best raiders in the world, but they have the time and the dedication to beat their faces against any kind of content. They are competent and motivated and in some cases, just badass. Broken, badly tuned, insanely difficult (First 2 weeks of M'uru hard) these things will not deter them. I look at Ensidia's first Hodir hard mode kill as basically a F*ck you blizzard; you can over tune encounters and we will still find a way to beat them. These guilds also have seemingly infinite resources with active rosters probably nearing 100 geared raiders. My hat goes off to the guild leaders of these kinds of guilds as they are probably managing a logistical nightmare keeping everyone rotated in raids (multiple raid teams?), recruiting quality people, and making counter raid comps for every encounter during a progression race. /salute

Top 1000 guilds are usually the server 2-4 ranked guilds that most likely have the same skill and understanding of the game as the T100 guilds, but simply don't have the time or the resources to dedicate to raiding as these more organized guilds. These people most likely have careers or other obligations in their lives that take precedent over raiding. They still get the rush, they still have fun, and they can clear content arguably with less time invested on the encounters themselves. They can rely on a steady roster of people and go at raiding with less time input that the T100. These people understand their class and possibly even more about other classes. This is the kind of guild I raid with today.

Everyone else has a few quality raiders but they do not have a steady roster and are generally more social and touchy feely and not as skilled as the top 1000. These players generally do not optimize their gear with gems and enchants nor do they understand the finer subtleties of how to raid with the class they play. Raid optimization also falls by the wayside, a symptom of not having a steady core. These guilds are doomed to raid Naxx until the end of time, and I think they are fine with that. The good players with a desire to raid other stuff will eventually leave and join more organized guilds.

At one time I raided with a guild very similar to a top100 in the first days of Sunwell and it was one of the most fun times I ever had raiding, but I spent 6 hours a day, 5 days a week raiding (not to mention time to farm consumables) while having a girlfriend, a job, and night school to do at the same time. It burns you and everyone else out.

Eventually M'uru downed us simply because we did not have the right classes online when we were doing progression and it didn't matter that everyone else was ready. Most nights we were one feral druid short. We got to M'uru phase 2 in a few nights after the cockblock gate was opened, but the guild stopped raiding before the pushback and add HP nerf. If we could have stayed together for another week we could have nailed the encounter with the nerfs.

This right here gets back to my point. To this day, guilds hold this prize over their heads: stomping pre-"nerfed" content. When new content is released Blizzard’s demographic is the T100 guilds. They can pretty much do whatever they want in terms of tweaking the difficulty of the encounters to stymie these juggernauts.

This claim to skill is a false one. It is a matter of ultra guilds with limitless time and resource constraints throwing everything in their arsenal at content to see it fall. Time is the most important factor here, and to a greater extent in this game as well; if you give a player enough time, eventually all content is meaningless (raids, achievements, gear) and everything can be accomplished even if you are terrible at the game.

Blizzard does not try to get the tuning right the first time; not because they are lazy, but because they know that no matter how it is tuned, there will be ways to cheese the encounters, and monster guilds that will chew through all the crap. They are taking an iterative approach to having these monster guilds help them tune the instance for the people with time and resource constraints. The test realms only help so much as some guilds do not even log onto them as they do not want the instances spoiled for them in order to make that first night of new content that much more fun; there is also very little incentive to test raid content on the PTR as it all your effort goes away come the real release save some experience with the encounters.

Sorry for the long post but this has been on my mind from all the lvl1 trolls throwing insults at each other for defeating pre-nerfed content and stroking their own E-Peen.

Raiding Recession?

2009-04-29T08:46:00.000-07:00

I am seeing a lot more people apply to our guild after the new patch. Some are from players that want to break into raiding, and some are from guilds that fell apart after Naxx boredom/Ulduar shock killed their guild.

There are only so many players a raiding guild can comfortably handle before they become too many or not enough. I use a sponge as an analogy. If the sponge doesn't have enough water for a long enough time, it becomes dry and cracks; a guild like this will most likely split off into several directions/new guilds. If a guild has too much water, the excess simply falls away from it; players not being utilized in the raid will quit and find other guilds that can better utilize them.

It seems to me that on my server there aren't enough jobs for people that want to raid the new content. Well, not exactly that, but there are people leftover that want to raid, but can't find a spot to do so; simultaneously there isn't enough critical mass in the leftover raiders to organize a new group of players to fill an entire raid.

People seem to be still stuck in the BC mentality that raiding = 25man. Ten man raiding is thriving and is at a better place than ever it seems, but if I was a 10man raider it would eventually go dry and I would want to go back to the 25man stuff. It seems that it would not take much effort to start raiding 10 man stuff, and eventually merging guilds to get into 25 mans again;that transition is sometimes such a shock that some guilds don't survive it.

Argent Tournament, take 2

2009-04-27T13:27:00.000-07:00

So, the dailys at the champion level is not as bad as I said.

I can be done with about 12 dailys (including fishing and cooking) and what is nice is that the objectives for the valiant double count with the champion quests. So in essence, you don't have to do the quests twice. Thumbs up.

The champion duels are still a little lame but are easy enough. I think I am down to 5 minutes to best four champions.

So, all said and done, I can net about 170g in one hour. Not bad. Plus I can get the red chicken after a week or two.

Greedy Goblin posted on the economics of Healing/Tanking/DPS, where he called non DPS players slaves to bad players. I disagree; one excellent tank/healer a raid does not make. He believes that the free market economics and Pareto optimal situations act as an invisible hand, but in a social environment this breaks down tremendously. This is not a game of predictable actions, this is a very emotional game where people do not often behave rationally. I for example spent a weekend grinding old world quests to get rep with the Gnomer Exiles just so I could ride a robot chicken. People sometimes do things that just don't make sense.

I am a pretty good tank, but somehow I don't think if I started to charge for my services that there would be a market for that. Maybe I could charge people to get acheivements that get them a nice pretty red drake, but I doubt a) people know what they want and b) that they would pay money for it. At least the rational people that I know.

The Argent Tournament

2009-04-24T10:10:00.000-07:00

So, I have been doing the Argent Tournament daily's on and off for the last week, and I am glad and discouraged at the same time at the approach the developers have taken with it. I went into it thinking these would be simple kill ten rats and fed ex quests that would be quick (see SSO dailys from sunwell) and net some nice coin. I was half right.

There are three levels of dailys: Aspirant, Valiant, and Champion. You start out as an aspirant, and you do some basic combat quests, fetching swords from princesses and killing some scourge. Pretty simple. These quests give some nice coin, as well as Aspirant tokens. After you collect so many aspirant tokens you can turn them in to become a Valiant and the whole process starts over. Valiant quests are slightly harder, more to kill, harder combat training, and you collect your tokens to be a champion. You net more gold but it just takes more time.

Champion quests are retarded. In comparison to the time it takes with regard to aspirant quests, it probably takes double the time per quest, and there are about double the quests. In essence it takes you four times as long to do double the quests for double the aspirant gold, but you get Champion seals to excange for gear, mounts and pets.

I have two reasons for doing these quests: getting some easy gold, and getting the robot chicken mount from championing Gnomeregon. I am not a mount or achievement whore but I have always wanted to ride around on a mechanostrider as it seemed fitting because I will never drop engineering until you pry it from my cold dead hand; Bliz lifting the mount restrictions made me pee a little. Being that I never got to roll a gnome paladin, I have to become a champion of Stormwind first, then start the Gnome Valiant chain, and become a champion of Gnomeregon before I can get the red robot mount. I am also getting rep with some faction I could give 2 craps about, which is better than nothing. If these quests did not give me any gold I probably wouldn't do them solely for the mount, but hey it is something to do between Ulduar raids.

Pros: Good rewards for the non raiders, gold for your troubles, more achievements and mounts.

Cons: More time sucked out of your day depending on your tournament rank, achievements and mounts.

My biggest complaint is how much time you spend doing the mounted dueling, and mounted scourge killing at the champion level. I like a challenge, but the horse dueling is fighting with a computer for about 2-3 minuets in order to kill it. 4 duels can take up to 15 minutes depending on how stingy the NPC. This seems a little backwards in terms of effort/reward.

Mounted scourge killing is this exact situation, but with limited number of mobs to kill. This is frustrating as well, as you are fighting the scourge as well as other players for tagged mobs.

For the OCD completionists, I can see 2 hours of grinding a day for the next 3 months in order to get all their acheivements, mounts, and pets. Eff that. This is good for Blizzard cause it keeps people in the game and paying subscriptions. This is copy paste from the Sunwell dailys but worse. This might be Activision handing down shovelware to keep subscription numbers up, and the sad thing is that it will do exactly that as people will keep playing the game to do this new "content."

Just label me bitter old disgruntled if you want. I know I am. I am just clinging to the glory days of raiding T5 and T6 as a ret paladin =P

I will post more on Ulduar later. So far I am liking the direction that raids have taken (more challenging) but I don't see any less skilled guilds getting very far. We will see when we have done the hard modes.

Airline Miles as Currency

2009-04-17T12:07:00.000-07:00

Being an engineer (and working with many of them) there are a lot of pauses which become awkward silences. Given enough time, my mind starts to wander into places that most people would consider odd. Not surprisingly these two events intersect quite often. My lunches are the most time I get to freethink during the average workday between all the attendees looking over eachother's shoulders trying to not get caught holding up the conversation and the munching of calories as soon as the food arrives.

My boss and I decided that today was burrito day. He likes to use his credit card at the burrito place so he can earn double rewards on his Discover card. This sparked today's thought.

The thing people lack more than anything in my view is patience. They would rather use resources (money, credit, points) sooner for tangible gratification now than holding off and waiting for something possibly better down the line, which may or may not ever come.

Airlines use frequent flier miles in order to build brand loyalty, and in my view could do a better job to instill that loyalty. I almost prefer not to "earn" them as I know when times get tough, the member rewards programs that companies offer are often the first to go. I am even unsure if there is some sort of airline mile inflation that make redeemable ticket further and further away even though the earning potential remains constant (one mile of flight = one mile point.) Perhaps this is to entice you to sign up for a bonus mile credit card or something of the sort.

The whole point of the program is to give you an incentive to fly with one airline rather than flying with the lowest cost option every time you need to travel. It would seem that airlines could ammend their program to give those with frequent flier miles the option of spending those points on something else rather than holding out for free hotel rooms or flights. Some flights offer in flight TV at an additional charge, as well as premium beverages and snacks which all cost real money.

Why not offer airline services (In flight services, premium seating, additional bag fees) in exchange for airline points as an alternative to paying real money? This all depends on the marginal cost/revenue of these services in relation to the things they currently offer, but it would promote brand loyalty as well as hook those people who don't fly enough to save for a free flight.

I know my boss was sold on the idea if he could watch TV on the plane for free if he could give up some of his earned miles on a flight. I know I would if we could work a resonable Hi-Wifi deal or something. I could farm something I needed in WoW rather than do a sudoku, or kill some brain cells watching TV.