Honor's Code

My next task was to run Memtest86 and Check Disk. Both utilities reported no issues. That was the first bit of good news I had had from the computer in a while. At that point, the issue was narrowed down to either the video card or the motherboard. I ran down to a local 'chop shop' (that's what I call a store that sells computers and used computer parts). For $20, I was able to get both fans and a cheap video card (RADEON 4600 512MB). I replaced the rear exhaust fan, but had some trouble getting the case off to access the front fan. I left that for later and kept the case open with a regular desk fan blowing in it. I replaced the video card, fired her up and installed the drivers. Word came up without an issue. Okay. I tried GiMP. No problems. No crashes, no blue screens. That was already an improvement over what I had been getting. I took a deep breath and started testing my games. I started small with Hearthstone which should be less taxing on the video card than anyt...

I was merrily doing my Garrison chores one fine evening when the screen changed to this wonderful technicolor display. The sound froze and then the screen turned blue and filled with a bunch of computerese. I recognized from the file name that one of my ATI RADEON dlls was the culprit. I shut down and restarted and everything came up fine. I chalked it up to a glitch and after a few moments started up WoW again. When the blue screen returned, I knew I was in trouble. I dove into trying to figure out what was going on starting with the video card drivers. The card I have is a RADEON 6800 series and they stopped supporting it back in March, but I tried every driver available for it on the ATI website, even the beta ones. No driver I tried made any difference. My next thought was to see if maybe, somehow the video card had become loose in the PCIe slot. I didn't how that could happen, but at that point, my main goal was "what", not "how". As soon as I touche...

Thanks to a contest run by the good folks over at WoWhead, I am now in Legion Beta. This blog post is Spoiler Free. Legion goes live in 82 days. I leave for vacation in 79. If you are thinking, that's great, plenty of time to play, you'd be wrong. If I try to break out the laptop and fire up WoW during this vacation, Mrs. Hammer will ensure that the Happiest Place on Earth isn't so happy. My goal with Beta is to both enjoy the story and figure out where everything is. When it is live, I'll be going as fast as I can in order to catch up. It's hard enough securing a tank spot. There's two and only two per raid. Being behind won't help. Hello Beta Logging into Beta was a jarring experience. I've been using ElvUI or Spartan for so long, I had almost forgotten what the default UI looked like. Character copy isn’t implemented yet so you get a stock Level 100 of your chosen class. Sure, I can call him Honors Hammer and make him look like Honors Ham...

In April, I was perusing my Twitter feed when I saw an announcement from Matt Walsh aka Rhidach. Oh, while no one particularly cares about WoW right now, I suppose I should get around to noting I resigned from writing for Blizzard Watch. — Matt Walsh (@Rhidach) April 20, 2016 While I'm going to miss my column and writing about paladins, I don't play WoW anymore and at this point I'm not sure I will in the future. — Matt Walsh (@Rhidach) April 20, 2016 Life has changed SO MUCH in the last year and I just don't have the time to pay the same attention to the game. I will miss it, though! — Matt Walsh (@Rhidach) April 20, 2016 Matt and his wife recently had a baby and I remember well from those days with both my baby Hammers that neither free time nor energy was in great abundance. I’ve wanted to write for  Blizzard Watch  for a long time, going back to their days before they were called Blizzard Watch. Once I heard about Matt stepping down, I contacte...

In early April, I talked about my experience with leveling a fresh toon in World of Warcraft as part of the Hearthstone promotion to get the new Lady Liadrin Paladin skin. The main issues I ran into were: combat was too short, other players were antisocial and heirlooms made dungeons not fun for anyone who lacked them. Rohan of Blessing of Kings had similar issues leveling for the promotion though he also had issues with the story in the low level zones. I didn't think that the Warcraft Development team would have time to address these concerns with Legion Alpha and now Beta taking up most of their efforts. They proved me wrong. The Devs started rolling out hotfixes to address some of the issues with the low level experience and one specifically to address what Rohan called the TTK (time to kill) issue. Due to the accumulated effect of years’ worth of max-level tuning adjustments, many classes were killing low-level enemies nearly instantaneously, even without heirloom gea...

What do you do with a free night and no Legion Beta invite? SWTOR! I finished Chapter 13. It was pretty good, but again, like all of them, I found it too short. For this chapter, I was really looking forward to seeing Vette enter the KotFE storyline.  Recently, I started a baby Sith Warrior with a guy I used to work with and I've been getting to know Vette better through that toon. Spoiler Alert: I like the way this character is written quite a bit. The initial interaction with her sets the tone well with her wisecracking the prison guard.  In Chapter 13, Vette is more the supporting actress. The star of the show is the Bounty Hunter companion, Gault. I never got far enough with my Bounty Hunter to meet Gault. He was something of an unknown to me and it didn't take long at all for him to turn off my Light Side Jedi Knight. I would have liked the Chapter better had Vette had more screen time. She is still the fun, wise cracking side kick but you can see the last 5 years...

I work the first Wednesday night of every month and I had told our raid leader I wouldn't be on for last week's run. Technically, I volunteer, since the job I'm doing on Wednesday night doesn't pay me, but I like to think of it as work in my mind. I love my Wednesday night job so it's not work in negative connotation, but it's easier to tell someone I can't do something on Wednesday night because I'm 'working' and it has 'work' level priority in my schedule. Much to my surprise when I did log on the next night, I was greeted with a new guild message of the day that stated we were on a raiding hiatus until Legion. Old Raids Even though we have Beta starting today, Legion is still months away. A couple of the team wanted to work on the old Mists of Pandari Meta achievements and I joined in. I'm a relatively easy Dwarf to please, just point me at something that wants to tear my face off and I'm happy. We started with Pandari...