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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
