Honor's Code

One of the activities that was taking up the majority of my ‘free’ time lately was the Blizzard Short Story contest. The basic idea was to write a short story set in either the Starcraft, Diablo, or Warcraft universe. You send the story into Blizzard and the winners get some pretty cool swag. Here’s the webpage to the contest if you want to see the details for yourself. For the past 6 weeks or so, I’ve been feverishly working on a story to enter. On August 22, 2010, a day before the actual due date, I entered my short story. Short is a relative word in this case. The rules stated that the story could be between 2,500 and 7,500 words. My story came in at 7,496. The biggest worry I have is that their version of Word will have a slightly different word count engine than mine, and I’ll come in over. But I can’t really do anything about that, so there is little point in worrying about it. I need to give a big shout out to Rhoelyn of Beneath Two Skies , and Steve Hall of Kestrel’s Ae ri

I’m sitting here tonight because I can’t log in to World of Warcraft. This is disappointing but nothing I’m all that upset about. I watched the first half of an NFL Preseason game on FOX and I’ll play a little Knights of the Old Republic after I post this. But those details, as exciting as they are, are not the reason for my post. According to Blizzard, my account renews at tomorrow, 08/20/2010, and I’m having a tough time deciding if I should bother renewing. Heroics are mind numbingly boring, and I overgear them on 3 of my 4 80s. I’d overgear them on my druid if I started playing him for more than a week. We are done with PVE content. I've killed Lich King on my main, and our group has taken so many hits we can’t even attempt hard modes anymore. I've gotten 2 alts almost as geared as my main. Summer I've tried PVP but its been tough. Horde on Nightfall for whatever reason have been losing a ton. It is not uncommon for it to take half a dozen games to get the dail

Rage scaling continues to be a thorn in the Developers side as they work on Cataclysm beta. Their plan for Rage Normalization is not meeting the design goals. Here is Lead Developer, Greg Street, aka Ghostcrawler summarizing the issue. Currently on beta, rage generation feels about right at level 80, but the income drops down more and more with higher levels. Now we have no doubt once warriors get epic gear with tons of haste and crit that they will have plenty of rage again, but that's the problem that rage normalization was really intended to fix . Source Rage is a strange resource mechanic. You start the fight with 0, and get rage from dealing or taking damage. For a DPS Warrior, you whack the Boss with a couple of auto attacks to generate some rage and then start using your specials like Bloodthrist, and Mortal Strike. (These two are given as examples, Warriors have many more special attacks.) The harder you hit, the more rage you receive until you are overflowing with rage.

The idea of healing again got me thinking about my sorted past with the Holy tree. It started out in what is now known as Vanilla. I dinged level 60 about 2 months before the original Naxxrammus came out. I was trying to catch on with a guild raiding Molten Core, Zul’Gurub, and Ahn’qiraj20. Back then, if you wanted to raid as a Paladin, you had one choice, and only one choice, and that choice was Holy. I had no issue with it at the time. Holy at that point was two things. Spamming Flash of Light, and spamming Decursive. Decursive was a wonderful little addon at the time. You hit the button and it figured out who to cleanse and cleansed them for you. And for certain fights, it was the only button I needed to push. Magmadar, Garr, and Lucifron can all die in the firey pit from whence they came. Over and over and over again. Debuffs go up, Debuffs get cleansed. It wasn’t exactly the most exciting game play in the world. But I went through most of Ahn’Qiraq, ZG, and MC. I got reall

I don’t know if you know Markco of Just My Two Copper . He’s a ‘gold blogger’. He tells people how to make lots and lots of WoW gold. I thought it was most strange when Markco asked me to write for the Carnival for I am epically bad at making gold. When I expressed this, Markco suggested I write about how I DO make gold. It seems like my blogging time keeps getting pushed further and further down the priority list, so I didn’t write the article in time for the Carnival. I’m going to publish it here instead. I don’t consider myself lazy, nor unintelligent, but making gold in WoW is not something I thrive at. I’ve tried buying low and selling high. I trusted my addons, and spent a bunch of gold on items to ‘flip’. That left me with a whole mess of worthless materials that I eventually sold at a loss. I’ve tried using my professions. My Paladin in a JC/Miner. Most of the I look at the Auction House on Altar of Storms, the uncut gems are selling for about the same as the cut gems. My a