Honor's Code

There's this thing called NaNoWriMo. You try to write 50,000 words of a novel in a month, or about 1600 words a day. Now, I don't want to go into this preparing to fail, but 1600 words a day is going to be a tall order. I only have so many hours in the day and honestly, most of them are spoken for before the sun rises. Work, and basic life maintenance (eat, sleep, driving, bathroom, bathing) account for a decent chunk, and aren't terribly negotiable. I only have a few hours every day to really call my own. Somewhere in those hours I need to do everything I need to get done. In order to get this done, somewhere along the way something’s got to give. One of those things, for the month of November, is this blog. I'll be relaunching the blog at the end of the month (and I'll let you know how I did).

My latest article is up on TorWars today. I’m looking at the changes to tanks coming in 1.2. Guardians look to be getting a pretty substantial buff and that makes me all kinds of happy. Think Tank: Patch 1.2 and You Greetings my fellow TORWarriors, and welcome to another exciting edition of Think Tank. This week, since all of the other columnists are thinking about it, I’m also thinking about Patch 1.2. If there is one constant in MMOs, it is change, and with 1.2 major changes are coming. This content update for Star Wars The Old Republic is huge, so I want… In personal news, my guild has folded after we lost our healers. We have been absorbed into a larger guild and we are trying to find our way. These guys seem pretty cool, but they are more progression focused than my old guild and the vent chatter is more R than PG-13, but I can handle that. I’m having a much harder time adjusting to my limited playtime. I simply can’t give SWTOR the kind of hours I used to pump into WoW and it...

When I stopped writing Honors Code, I had several people ask me to let them know if I started up another blog. Since I have, in fact, started up a new blog, I thought this medium would be the best way to let my former readers know about it. The blog is called: Ted the Third . (It’s a working title.) Its not a World of Warcraft blog, or even a general gamming and MMO blog. My new blog focuses on a new pursuit of mine. It’s actually not a new pursuit, but it has become more of a focus. The blog talks about my dream to try to become a professional, published writer. It talks about what I’m writing, what I’m learning, and what I’m struggling with. I also sometimes go off-topic and talk about news, or current events. The obligatory first post will fill you in on most of the details. Actually, I’ve started up two blogs, but after some consideration, I’ve decided to keep the Daddy blog private. If you really want to read the Daddy blog, drop me an email and I’ll send you a link. I’m still...

The bad news is I'm not going to 'win' NaNoWriMo. 50,000 words this month just isn't going to happen and now that I'm in the throes of it, I'm not really sure why I thought it would. Check that, I know why I thought it would. I was under the delusion that 50,000 words would be easy. I had the story pretty much written out in my head, and I figured it wouldn't be too hard to just bang it out. But along the way I found that I grossly overestimated the amount of words I've done in a writing session. Just for fun, why don't you guess how many words are in this blog post and I'll put the answer at the bottom. The good news is that I'm not going to let the fact that I'm not going to 'win' NaNoWriMo stop me. I'm going to keep writing and we will just see how far I get. I have a littany of excuses, and explanations for why I'm not going to win, but I'm not even going to mention those. I'm tired of being an excuse and expl...

Oi-vey, am I behind on my posting or what? Anyway, we raided one time right after the new talents came out. I did well, but consistently lost to our Rogue. Here’s the meter from Deathbringer Saurfang. He’s very good and very well geared, plus he’s been playing a Rogue as his main since at least Burning Crusade and I’m just starting to play my Warrior. I know 9k is a little low based on some numbers I’ve heard from other Warriors, but this was 10 man, with only 10 man buffs. Suffice to say, I was pleased with my performance. Here is the breakdown of my damage:   The 4 misses indicate I still need more hit. I need to do some research on the Glancing mechanic, and figure out why that was almost as high as Crit. As you can see I’m pretty much ignoring Slam. MMO-Champion states that the new Beta build has reduced the Rage cost of Slam. That will help because it just wasn’t doing enough damage for the Rage cost. The situation in the game hasn’t changed a great deal. We actually sched...

4.01 has marked the official switch from my Paladin to my Warrior, along with switching from a main spec Tank to a main spec DPS. My game play, and therefore the fodder for my blog, is going to be more focused on the Warrior DPS side of things. I’ve debated if it would make more sense to simply shut down Honors Code, and create a new blog to reflect the new focus. An informal survey of my Twitter follows seems to indicate that the DPS Warrior appears to be underrepresented in the Blogosphre. It’s a similar situation to the Paladin Tank when I started the blog way back in 2007. On the writing front, I wasn’t named among the winners for the Blizzard Short Story Contest, but I had a blast , and I learned some important lessons as well. I will allow myself the delusion that I made it at least past the first couple of cuts, but honestly, I have no idea if that is true.  Now I want to take that experience and expand upon it for NaNoWriMo . So if blog posts are sparse during the month of...

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve likely heard about a small event happening on December 7,2010. It’s actually a rather large event. One could say it is right down cataclysmic. Someone reminded me on Twitter that I never blogged about what I was going to make my main toon in Cataclysm. My last blog was about how I decided that the Druid would not be the one to get to 85 first. The next toon that I eliminated was the Hunter. I still plan on taking him to 85 at some point, but not first. Hunters have undergone too many changes in Cataclysm, and I’m not looking for a roller coaster of buffs and nerfs while they rebalance what is in essence a new class. For the same reason, I’m retiring my venerable Paladin. The Paladin has once again undergone a dramatic redesign. While I appreciate the Developers efforts to bring the class closer to their vision, I’m not excited about relearning my class. If I was going to do that, I would really want to take a toon from level 1 on up. I k...

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...