The patch-eth cometh

Overall I'm a big fan of patches when it comes to WOW.  Certainly there are times when patches break the game, mess up most of your addons that make you lazy, cause quests to become bugged that previously were not, and insta-kills all the Death-knights named hope/peace/love.  Ok.  SO maybe it's every patch that does this, but I have a good reason for liking patches.  A lot of times good things come with patches like new content, abilities, etc.  I for one am very excited about the upcoming 3.0.8 patch.  

Anyone that plays a Tauren should be much happier after this goes live.  My biggest excitement comes form the fact that there are no longer any racial restrictions on mounts. None.  Nada.  Just because I'm big boned doesn't mean I can't ride that skeletal warhorse anymore.  

First let me take you back a little ways from what I can remember the way mounts worked.  Back before BC, when we were able to hit a measly lvl cap of 60, BRD took 5 hours easy for all the content in it and more if pugged, and there were no flying mounts, mount training was a bit more specific.  You actually learned to ride each specific mount type.  If you wanted to ride a kodo you learned to ride kodos.  If you were a Tauren that wanted to ride wolves, then you grinded to exhalted with orgrimmar and then learned to ride wolves as well(assuming you already learned to ride kodos).  So a ton of time and effort and money would go into making your character faster. From what I hear (as I was not a playing memebr when it was about) riding used to cost a lot more to learn (and doubly so since money was hard to come by). But that changed into a consolidated riding skill.  Now when you learn riding you can get any mount that has that skill associated with it, minus racial restrictions.

Racial restsrictions have always been a little depressing forme.  Being a tauren shaman and knowing that i'm locked out of 3, count them 3, of my horde faction mounts restricts the mode of transportation that we are offered.  It's like going to baskin and robbins and only being able to choose form vanilla or chocolate and not having acess to cookie dough, superman, or moose tracks.  Plus on top of that, our factions mounts(kodos) there are only 5 of them total to get.  All the other factions have 6 at least to choose from.  

One thing that really struck me as odd is the raptors.  Why can't taurens ride raptors? I have several good reasons for why we should be able to.

1. We get a war raptor option.

Obviously this is proof that raptors can carry tauren.  This only leads me to believe that the rest of the raptor must not have been bred as strong as their war version couterparts.   But it still acts as prrof that raptors can carry us.

2. There is no option for a skeletal warhorse for Tauren

We can't ride the normal faction related ones either.  This is understandable beacuse they are just a pile of bones anyways.  But further proves that if we couldn't ride raptors...we shouldn't have a war option either.

3. We can ride wolves

This is purely from an observational/physical observation.  First wolves have 4 feet and raptors have 2.  Now you could infer that well the wieght gets spread over the 4 feet bettre than 2, but i thinking of how that weight is actually applied, while riding a raptor the weight is directly over the 2 legs, while on a wolf it gets applied in the middle of the back in between the 2 pairs of legs.  This I believe would cause more of a problem as the wolf would likely have back injuries whereas the raptor wouldn't.  Plus the raptors legs looks physically stronger than the wolves so I wouldn't think only haveing 2 would be cause for concern.  Wolves are also smaller in comparison overall than raptors.  

So overall I think we should have at least been granted the right to ride the troll mounts, the raptors.  The only way we could obtain a skeletal horse or a hawkstrider was a very low drop off of 2 bosses.  Granted the barons moutn could essentially be farmed with some decent gear at 70 but the drop rate is ridiculously low.  The hawkstrider was from a heroic instance which didn't favor enhancement shamans beacuse cc was required on one of the boss fights in order to not wipe.  I prety much boycotted that dungeon and only ran it once on normal(as resto) and once on heroic(after the 51 -point talent patch).  As I'm one for not reinforcing stereotypes that all shamans at lvl cap are resto I prety much determined this was not a mount I would get.

So this leaves us with 6 wolves, 5 kodos, 3 PVP mounts pre bc.  Needless to say I'm extatic that we are finally getting a chance to ride around on any mount we please.  This must mean that they developed a steroid for all those mounts we couldn't use before or Taurens are getting liposuction.  Either way I'm down with the change.

Oh and more graveyards in good ol' Azeroth.  This is something that should help with the earlier leveling as well.  I don't know how many times I've  died somplace to find myself in a graveyard that is on the other end of the zone and thus spend 5 min running back to my corpse only to res and get killed again and have to make the trip again.  And faster ghost forms for everyone is nice too.

As far as the Shaman aspect is concerned a couple good things are happening. One that has been a long time coming is fire nova totem no longer causes threat.  This is excellent.  I've never used that toetem much due to the fact that the only way i can get it to go off is if I use it with stoneclaw totem first to distract everything.  Now all i have to do is drop it and wait.  It always annoyed me when i would drop the totem and all the stuff currently attacking me would instantly attack the totem and then procede to attack me again. Looks like i'll need to dust off the fire nova totem.Magma totem even got buffed some to do more damage and no threat, so another bonus to our aoe.

Theres probably some other changes that may not be so good, but overall I'm going to be enjoying it riding on my new skeletal horse once the patch is released. Just call me the McRib.

Generating Heat in Northrend

Wrath of the Lich King has been out for a few weeks now, and I admit my Tauren Shaman hit 80 within 12-13 days after its release. Now this seems relatively fast to me considering how long it took me to finally hit 60 on my first high level character and coming down to the last quest in my Onyxia attunement quest, and then Burning crusade was released. So i never completed that chain. Instead I slowly started grinding my way up to 70 to hopefully participate in a little more end game this go round.

Now I admit I happened to play a lot of hours those first couple weeks after the release of WOTLK which attributed to my shaman reaching the next level cap relatively quickly. But the real reason I leveled so quickly was a couple of reasons.

1. The quests are dynamic and fun.
2. I had a friend to do most of the quests with me.

These 2 things really allowed me to burn up the leveling in Northrend to just shy of a level a day.

Personally I love all the new quests in Northrend especially anything that requires me to ride inside, on the shoulder of, on top of a head, in a giant's fist, etc. These are all the new siege warfare like quests and they are a ton of fun. In fact I almost wanted to fail them over and over again just so i could keep doing them. But i have other characters that I will get to do these quests again. Luckily some of the dailies remind me of a couple of these quests so even doing the dailies is fun in my opnion.

Anyways, back to the key at hand. Now that I'm a new 80 Tauren Shaman i look back at everything I've done so far in Northrend and I have to wonder to myself..."Where's my parka? And why didn't i catch a cold?" Notice i mentioned a Cold which although is a disease of some sorts i believe my disease cleansing totem only works on bacterial style infections. That and scourge like infections. Colds are viruses and even though shamans can walk on water like Jesus, they can't cure the common cold.

I guess maybe I was just doing things fast enough that I created my own little heat pocket and didn't have to worry about the cold weather affecting my character. But now that I'm 80 I fear he might come down with something as I change my play style a little bit.

But I have an idea that might keep me occupied and feeling fresh on my shaman for a bit. I'm thinking of switching to Elemental for a while. I love enhancement...always have and always will. But the new skills that shaman get just seem more viable for elemental spec. Lava Burst takes a couple seconds to cast and doesn't work with maelstrom weapon which would make it instant cast for me. I don't know about the other enhancement shamans out there, but standing still for 2 seconds to cast a spell just doesn't cut it for me anymore. I can be pew pewing with my massive mace and offhand fist weapon for a lot more during that time. So I've used it like 3 times since I got it at lvl 75.
My other skill at 80 I have used quite a bit mostly for fun and novelty. Hex is something shamans should have had at lvl 40. I'm guessing that those trolls in Zul'Furrak must have some massive mojo going on because not only can they cast it in their 40s...they can instant cast it. Poof your a frog. And the trolls can keep killing you for the duration.
Obviously this can never bee the case for shamans because then we would be instantly OP in PVP. Not that that would be a bad thing. Shamans need a little PVP love. So I do like hex (especially to show off to the other crowd control players and say "eat that" Mr. I -have-cc-and-you-dont-so-we-dont-want-you-for-the-dungeon-even-though-you-kill-things-by-making-them-explode).

I even got enough loot from quests so far that I have a complete blue set for enhancement and mostly blue set for elemental/healing. So I'm going to respec for the fun of it.

That about sums it up for now. I'll be talking more about upcoming patch notes in the near future to share my complete and "udder" joy at some of the changes coming.

So until next time, when you feel like you aren't killing things fast enough...check your weapons for windfury.

Change is a good thing, right?

Now for your daily dose of blogging by me, your friendly host, Lance.

Today I'm going to try and get a little more into the real life, video game crossover and maybe reinforce how game worlds seem to start blurring with the real world, except for the fact that we don't have orcs(LOTR is fictional too), trolls(except on forums), tauren(cow people), gnomes(no...short people are NOT gnomes), or elves of any sort(once again LOTR is fictional).

Anyways. So change is a good thing, as long as it's change for good or change that in the long run will be beneficial.
It's been a few weeks since i've blogged so I'm going to try and catch everyone up on as much as possible. As I have said before I'm enhancement thanks for asking might be a little outdated at this point. True I do still have all my gear from being enhancement but I've done the almost unthinkable, I've re-specialized to being a healer. Now I know what you are thinking, "NO! It can't be! You were my last hope because in the long run I realize that being enhancement was completely doable in the long run even though everyone expect you to be a healer." By no means does thi mean you will have to be a healer too. I made the decision after much deliberation and because I had half considered doing this a long time ago because I kept getting healing gear, mostly from quests that wouldn't give me any other reward that would benefit me as enhancement. I got about one thing for every slot in my inventory that was +healing gear in some fashion or another.

Now let me give you a little background on the situation. My dear friend and guild mate had been have teasing half hoping that I would go resto. In fact on one of our runs through KARA off of the 2 bosses that we had killed there were 2 Healing pieces that I was the only one in the group that could use, if i ever decided to go resto. The third boss in the place has a pretty good chance to drop a lot of healing gear and i had gotten a piece off of them before but I said that if healing gear that I could use dropped off the 3rd boss I would go resto. Now I decided to say this because we did need a couple more healers as we often had to pick up a random healer on our server to fill in the spot and as DPS we had 10 DPS in our guild that wanted to go to Kara that night but we could only take 5. So I figured I could solve 2 problems that we were having in having a steady run towards progressing as a guild.

So i respecced to resto. I had to get a few more heling pieces to be full of healing gear and some of that filled out quite nicely from the run of Kara the next week with me making off like a bandit and getting 3 pieces that really helped me out. We also made it to the last boss and got him to 5% of his health after a few tries. We tried a couple more times(for a total of 6) but didn't do nearly as well the next couple of times. But overall I'm just excited that we got him that close to being beaten. You can see some of our guild info and progression here. We were going to try him again the next night but not enough people showed up so we decided to go ahead and wait a week till we got a chance to down him.

Anyways, so I'm glad to be helping out in places I can by modifying how I work sometimes. It's something I try and do in real life as well. Changing a little bit here and there to try and help others out even though it's not something that always comes to my mind. Being able to step back occasionally and ask, is what I'm doing helping out everyone else, or should I change something to make it better and easier for them? It's somethign that a lot of us decide not to do in games or real life. Often we get comfortable with the way things are (especially if you have a decent job you like, you have enough money to save and live comfortably on, and everything else is just honkey-dorey), and forget that we can still improve who we are. We get so used to setting goals and achieving them that when we get older we often get to a point where we accept what our life is like without thinking I can still be better. Or more importantly taht we can start to give back to the community now since we are in a place where we don't have to worry so much about ourselves.

So whether in game or out, remember that sometimes a little change can be good.

Real Life and Raiding

So anyone that regularly has been reading my blog (which is porbably just me) you might be wondering to yourself "How do you find so much time to play games?". Truth be told i'm not sure myself. I do spend a lot of late nights staying up way to late when i should be sleeping earlier or occasionally deferring things like washing dishes or cleaning until later jsut to spend more time unwinding in a fictional world or trolls, humans, gnomes, orcs, monsters, and cow people.

But I do try and balance my normal life with the time i spend playing WOW. Lets face it. Not only is it bad for social interaction when you devote too much time to something like wow, or any game for that matter, but at times playing the game for hours on end can get tiring by doing the same quests for the 100th time. Whether it be for your 8th character that you have made or your running your lower lvl friends though a dungeon sometimes it can be more like work than play.

i do admit that i love running people through lower level dungeons as it gives me a break from my daily grind in Outlands or farming for mats, or earning money just to buy things i want. Plus it gives me a boost to my confidence as i can clear a dungeon in 30 min that would have taken me at least 2 hours with a properly lvled group that knew what they were doing. One-shotting mobs that once took a good 30-45 seconds to kill can be quite satisfying in some aspects. But when too many people want me to run them one right after another then things start to feel too much like the daily grind and i Feel like i can't get things done that I need to get done.

But back to real life. Recently in the months that are coming prior to WOTLK expansion I still feel like i have plenty to do. I'm one of the lucky souls that haven't beaten every dungeon/raid yet. I love the fact that I am just now getting to go do Karazhan and that we've only run it 3 times so far but every week we seem to progress further than the last. I feel like I'm finally getting to do something that I've wanted to do for all this time. Truthfully I would like to go back and raid Onyxia who seemingly has fallen off the face of the planet when BC was released raising the level cap to 70 and making lvl 60, 40 man raids almost an afterthought. I love looking forward to raiding kara once a week and doing some heroics every now and again with the other people in the guild as we now have enough to do a couple heroic groups and almost enough for a full kara group.

Well as fate would have it i'm out of town on a business trip this week and so i can't make the regularly scheduled appointment time of Firday as I will be In the air on my way back home. but I've noticed that we don't have it scheduled till tomorrow later. But I still do have something much more important happening tomorrow that really doesn't make me regret not being able to go. My grandmother is turning 90 and so all the relatives will be in town for this event celebrating someone who is kinda the reason most of us in our family are alive.

it kind of saddens me to think that if i had a more crucial role in the group that i might be worried about the guild more than my family, but I find myself fully understanding that it's completely ok to say that you can't make a run some week. A lot of guilds might not like this, but truthfully if you are that shorthanded on people to do raids then you are going to need to recruit some more help anyways. It's hard to get even 10 people together for raiding once a week let along 2 or 3 or 4 times, unless you all work at the same place which has 8-5 mon-fir work week, and you all are single and have no other responsibilities or extracurricular activities.

So although some people say casula raiding can't be done...well i'm doing it. Nuff said. Life should come before games as it gives us something to talk to others that we know in game about and thus make playing the game that much more fun.

WoW is not for Wussies or Wimps

I'm not saying that everyone that plays WoW is a hardcore video game fan, or it is only composed of people that are body builders and fitness freaks(far from it). I'll explain exactly what I mean in a second. First the intro.

So recently our guild has just merged with another and I must admit I enjoy having more 70s to do questing/dungeons/ raids with. It's also nice to see more people in general online and talking in guild chat. I mean sometimes I went to the Barrens (ironic isn't it) to have some lively conversations when I was the only person logged on in the guild. Well anyways, the merger is good, not entirely what we expected as recently the roles of leadership have been redefined ever so slightly from what was originally planned. But I'm good with sticking things out since that's what I like to do. Now for the bridge into discussion.

I like to stick things out. For good or bad, I've only left one 5-man party because things were completely awful....and others in the group had already left. This was on my priest. I love playing with my Tauren shaman but i started up a healing priest mainly because everyone needs a healer and a tank for things(i made a tank as well). Truthfully I love playing all the aspects but i find that being a healer or a tank also has other responsibilities linked with it other than just pulling your own weight. Being a healer or a tank take absolute commitment to make it work. When you join a group for a dungeon in one of these roles you are committed to staying with the group until it is finished mainly because you are rare to begin with and the group rally can't function without you. DPS, although my favorite, is quite expendable (as shown to me countless times by 3 or 4 manning dungeons.) I've been in countless groups where the tank or healer gets extremely frustrated with little issues (some downright ridiculous) and then one of them alt+f4 out of the game to log off. leaving the rest of the group wondering if the just have connection issues or they really did log off because the rogue refuses to sap targets that aren't humanoid (which they can't fyi).

Now I have to admit when I've played the tank or the healer there are things that absolutely frustrate me and sometimes make me wanna quit a group. As a healer I hate it when someone other than the tank pulls mobs causing me to have to heal them quite a bit on top of watching the tank, or my favorite when the tank isn't doing his job right and I end up dying or coming close to dying every pull. Now sure the latter has only happened once and that was with the aforementioned group that I left. The paladin tank couldn't for the life of him control the aggro on the mobs. I couldn't understand it. I would heal him once and 4 out of the 5 mobs would come after me because he wasn't doing. We even suggested to him what he needed to do but he just wouldn't do it. The only thing worse than a tank that doesn't tank properly isone that will not listen to reasonable suggestions either.

On the other side of things as a Tank I hate it when people pull aggro off of me. This includes things like the fire mage casting pyroblast on a mob in a group of guys that i haven't targeted or even made a motion to go tank them yet.(Good way to get your mage dead) Or the same mage (i know i'm picking on mages but just wait) casting spells at a banished mob wasting his mana and then complaining that i need to wait up for him to drink after that fight. Generally I don't like it when people don't use abilities that i know they have and could help out the group.

Now I must admit, there might have been times that I had done the same thing to tanks and healers with my shaman but I at least had an understanding that I don't go "Leroy Jenkins" the mobs before the Tank even make a motion to pull. but playing both of these other classes made me realize how annoying things can be and why the tank and healer could up and quit the group at any given moment. That is unless it's one of mine. I'm determined to stick it out from now on. Plus it goes with the job that you are going to pull aggro one way or another and you just got to hope that everyone will be standing in the end or if not at least someone that can resurrect everyone is.

I'm enhancement, thanks for asking.

As you have probably figured out I have a Tauren Shaman which I love to play and I think i do a good job at it. Recently I've been getting him geared up with armor and weapons to maximize my potential for shredding the enemies with my massive DPS (damage per second). Now there are 3 types of shamans that you can be. 2 of them include DPS: one is melee and the other is ranged/casting style. The third type is Healing or Resto (short for Restoration). I'm the first type. Up in your face with my weapons flashing all out attack being my style and i respect the other types as well as they play their parts very well. But my problem isn't with other shamans(with the exception of one that played a cruel joke on me...but we are cool haha).

My problem is with non-shaman classes from PUGS. Nowadays i seem to get tells multiple times a day saying things like "you wanna heal blank", or "we doing blank need healer" or even better when they just invite me to the group and then tell/ask me if I'm healing the group(me being the 5th person in the 5-man group). This happens both when i'm actively looking for a group and when i'm not. I understand healers are hard to come by and shamans are really good healers and all....but then it hit me. What really infuriates me about this whole situation is 2 things. One is up until i hit 70 i never once got a whisper asking me if i wanted to heal a dungeon. Not one time. Nada, zilch, zippo, nil, null, void. You get the picture. Yet i've seen healing shamans all the way from lvl 1-70(in fact we have one in our guild who is pretty good lvl 50 healer). It's as if up until 70 no one expects shamans to be healers but once you hit 70 you are basically expected to be a healer.

They don't even ask politely about it anymore. They want results and fast. They don't even bother with the rudeness of "what spec are you" first and jump straight to the assumption that I'm a healer. I used to reply to things by saying "I could heal, but we would all die" or "I could heal but i don't do it very well with my dual wielding axes" or even "I'm DPS sorry". I don't know why i'm apologizing to them. I shouldn't be sorry for not being a healer because i love what i do.

The scond part to this is that when i am looking for a group people still make the mistake that i'm a healer even though there is a comment box that you can put what spec you are in for all people to see in the Looking For Group box. I think people are just too lazy to hover over my name and see that yes indeed he has stated in his box that he's DPS and not a healer. i would like to believe that it's just becasue they see the shaman in the LFG and assume he's a healer and just don't know about the fact that they can easily see what i am. But I truthfully think people are lazy about this issue.

So overall i've just stopped responding to people asking me if i wanna heal beacuse i think that unless they ask me in a proper way i won't respond to that question and that will be answer enough.

Oh i just thought of a 3rd thing. Wowarmory even assumes i'm a healer. I mean it even knows that i'm heavy into the enhancement(dps) tree and it gives me suggestions of weapons that add + to spell damage or healing when i want to look for an upgrade. Now mind you, i know armory isn't perfect but I don't have that kind of problem with any other class that i've had so far. Maybe i should start joining groups as the healer and just not say anything until the party wipes on the first pull and they ask why i didn't heal them....and they will notice me dying looking awesome as a dual-wielding nunkchuck sorcerer abraham lincoln.

Merger has Begun!

So for those of you have have been keeping track of my recent activities in WOW you will have noticed that a merger was being planned between Rabid Kittens of Camelot and DIABLO. It has finally gotten underway as of last Saturday adn I must admit I'm very pleased with the result so far. Minion logged into his alt to start up the new guild named "United Pwnall Service" (play on United Postal Service aka UPS where Pwn = obliterate/destroy/humiliate in regards to opponent). Imnotshirley was the member that thought this up and I was instantly in favor of this name after long hours of brainstorming on my own.

Not only is it funny, it essentially incorporates our guild. I want to say up front that what I am about to say may kind of sound cheesy or a little too lame. So if you don't like that sort of stuff then skip down to where it says **CONTINUE READING HERE**. Ok well first of all it's United which shows that it's the unification of the 2 guilds into a new group that has decided to go forward with a common cause. Pwnall is because we are awesome and we strive to smoke any resistance that comes our way whether it be PVP (player vs player), PVE (player vs environment), BG (battlegrounds), or basket weaving. The service part kinda ties adds a little more dimension on everything because it states that we are bringing something to the table that needs to be addressed. There is a need for what we do and we are here to fulfill it. All together it basically states that we are a guild determined to bringing our A-game to all aspects of WoW because it's what the game demands of us to do.

**CONTINUE READING HERE**
It means we will destroy anything that gets in our way and we will do it with style.

But yeah the merge has been good so far. I gave the GM duties to my lvl 13 hunter alt that I pretty much have decided not to level just for transferring stuff and making sure others from the guild get invited to the new merged guild. I've already cleaned out the guild bank funds and only about half of our supplies from the bank tabs (which I'll note will still be around for extra storage purposes should they be needed). And DIABLO has done likewise. We also wnet ahead and ran our first instance together with our pally tanking and their priest healing and th rest of us filling in the DPS. We burned through the dungeon pretty quickly and a couple of the hunters pieces dropped which was good. Afterwards our pally mentioned being tricked into doing a "normal" instance, which i admit was really easy, and said we need to start running heroics asap. I completely agree. Even if most of us aren't completely geared for Heroics I think that's half the fun and battle. Heroics should cause wipes and frustration and challenge beacuse that's how it forces groups to grow. Giving up just because you can't handle the fact that something isn't easy is contrary to the concept of how these dungeons are supposed to be run. It's meant to be a progression through the stages to get better gear not so you can beat that particular instance repeatedly with no problems, but so you can tackle the next challenge to get better gear.

All in all I think this will work out pretty well. We just need a couple tanks and maybe some higher lvl healers and we will even be set to start doing 10-man raids like Kara soon. Guess it's time to start hardcore lvling my priest from 60-70 now. Its kind of funny that once I do this my alt will soon be better geared than my main but hey that's the way it goes with healers and tanks...they get geared pretty fast and they should.

Guild Mergers as complicated as real life.

First I would just like to thank Blizzard for reinstating the old size of my Tauren's weapons while sheathed. I do enjoy my weapons staying the same size whether i'm using them or not.

Now on to the good stuff.

The Rabid Kittens of Camelot, the guild I'm the leader of and helped create with some of my friends, has come quite a ways in the last few weeks i think. We've been adding more people (and not just our many alts) and we are up to 76 members. Of that i would say there are probably 20 distinct players and about 8-10 regular players that have been on in the last week. There are about 4 70s that are on regularly and we have a couple alts that are coming up to the 60-70 range. One of my co-founders and i have been talking heavily about getting more people recruited to the guild since we are both geared out for Heroic Dungeons or Karazhan which is a 10 man raid. But often times in dungeons and raids like this it's very hard to get PUGS together due to the fact that when you don't run something regularly with a group of people you have to explain more or you don't know things like the enhancement shaman is going to pull some serious aggro with the DPS he's outputting. (If you don't understand the last sentence just keep reading and don't worry about it). Tanks in particular for some reason don't like to PUG probably because they don't like to die/wipe. Although truthfully it's the tanks job to try and die by getting everything possible to attack him instead of everyone else. It's the healer's job to keep the tank alive which in turn is easier if the tank's doing his best at keeping the mobs focus on him/her.

So anyways, Minion, a mutual WOW friend of myself and mikey, proposed that we merge our guild with that of DIABLO which is his old guild. He's not currently in it but would come back to it if we merged. He's been talking it over wiht that group and they are ok with it and wondered if I would be cool with the merger.

When presented with this option I really only had 3 concerns.
What would the new name be?
Who would be the leaders/officers?
How would the rest of my guild be with this decision?

Now while i do worry about our name being Hello Kitty Online or leadership going solely to that of current leaders in standing in DIABLO i worry the most about bad blood between guildies. Believe me, I've seen guilds go crazy over little issues and completely disband and cause all sorts of craziness by spreading rumors and such. So that's the reason why I want things to be kosher between everyone if the merger happens(which it's going to happen sooner or later). I take this leadership thing seriously as i look at everything that affects the guild as a whole something that the whole guild should be ok with. If it's going to cause problems then I'll nix it.

Of course i've got a little advantage in the situation as the majority of the people that have been adding in recently are people i used to work with , so i know them in real life and can talk to them face to face. And they are all cool with it. I'm more worried about the people that bring a lot to the guild but i can't meet face to face, although i'm pretty sure they would be cool with it as well, but i just want to make sure first.

But talks are in progress and i took the time to send out letters in the in game mail to every guild member that has been on at least in the last month for support and to feel free to ask questions about what this will mean. I still don't have all the specifics down but some possibilities are co-leadership from myself and the other guild leader with a hidden figurehead guild master controlled by someone trustworthy enough not to loot the guild bank and disband the guild.
Also some possibilities on names have come up like "Rabid Diablo kittens" or "Diablo Kittens of Camelot" or "Diablos Rabid Kittens" and "Troggdor"(gotta love a little variety). But I will keep this updated with the progress that is being made in the negotiations.

Who would have thought something as trivial as a guild merger in a fictional world would have so many aspects as something in real life. I wonder if any company mergers get fed up over a trivial thing like loot or when to raid etc....

Tauren Shaman Blog

OK so like i said. I'm going to try and do some more blogging. Particularly in reference to WOW. I mean what better way to spend my time when i'm not wasting it away playing WOW, than to take more time and blog about it?

Anyways, I've recently discovered one of my now favorite WoW blogging sites, because its filled with people like me. Players of WoW or similar games that just like to have some fun with the intricacies of how the game works. It has everything from tips on every class, but also things like race specific comments and outrages.

So I just recently went over the 2.4 patch notes and even though it's not listed(as are a lot of things addressed in the patch notes) Male Tauren weapons are now 50% smaller when sheathed. This was supposedly due to weapons clipping through the ground. Especially 2-handed weapons.

Wait wait wait wait ........wait....................wait.
So what your saying is the Male Tauren has been singled out and had something that was appealing to the class(everything being huge) and almost make a mockery of it. It's like we are being discriminated against, almost as badly as the troll population as a whole. So now my weapon is 50% smaller when sheathed making it smaller than orc weapons (who are subsequently shorter and greener than taurens).

Proportionally speaking it makes other weird things like human greatswords looking as tall as their are while it's tiny on a tauren's back.


Now mind you I haven't really noticed the change for a number of reasons.
1. I have been lvling my priest alt to get her to Outlands.
2. When I have been on my Tauren Shaman, I've been Dual Wielding most of the time. Overall my damage output is higher and I don't have to worry about losing mana as fast, and wehn i'm running guildies through instances it's easier to grab aggro off of multiple mobs when It doesn't take me almost 4 seconds to swing at something (and potentially miss.)

Sure when I draw my massive 2Handed mace now it looks like a magic trick but leaving my weapon draw isn't a possibility in some cases like when riding a mount. It automatically is sheathed, except during a small glitch I found after eating a savory deviate delight.
And truth be told when you are riding around Azeroth or the Outlands your staring at your back for 80-90% of the time.

I think that if they do this change that everythign should get scaled down porportionally...(making gnome great swords smaller than most peoples daggers )
But i have yet to truly check this out for myself but i'm sure it will not make me happy in the least.

On a more positive note, I do love being a Tauren Shaman.

Wow Arena Tournament Characters Upset Me

Ok. So I haven't really been blogging much. Never really have since I think of my life as pretty mundane most of the time. But I'm going to start blogging a little about my experiences on WOW and possibly rant a little here and there about it all.

Now on to the main topic.

So I have this lvl 70 Tauren Shaman which will remain nameless at the moment. For those of you that do not play WOW and have no idea what I'm talking about, just know that level 70 is the highest level you can get right now. It takes a lot of hard work and long hours of questing and earning experience from slaying various monsters. And no matter what people tell you or what guides you see, it can't be done in 5 days or whatever ridiculous amount the say. It takes a really long time, lets leave it at that.

Anyways another site where you can go to quickly look up information on your character and see his items and find upgrades without having to log into the game. This is a pretty sweet site i must admit. Well anyways, when you search for a character on there it returns the results in a Highest to Lowest level ranking which is nice because as you climb in the levels your character appears higher in the list. You can also see all the other characters with the same name on different servers and what class/race they are i.e. Race=Tauren Class =Shaman.

Ok now to get to the heart of the matter. So for a while now my Character has been one of 2 Tauren Shamans with non-aforementioned name. My guy is level 70 and the other was like lvl 10. Now there are about 5 total characters on different realms that all have level 70s with the same name but Mine has always showed up on the top of the list due to recent activity I believe. Well needless to say I went to look him up the other day and lo and behold there is another Level 70 Tauren Shaman with the same name at the top of the list from the arena tournament.

You got it. The guy that all he did was log in to the server and say set me up with a level 70 Tauren Shaman with this name is at the top of the list now. The guy that didn't put in the long hours to get him to that point, didn't suffer through various groups that had no idea what they were doing, didn't have to work hard is at the top of the list. Sure i can still find my guy because he's right there but i have to pause before clicking on my name. All i'm asking for is that Blizzard had put in some exception clause that prevented the arena guys from popping up to the top of the list. Just as a bit of respect of those of us who worked hard to get where we are.

Well that's all I have for now about my recent discovery but I'm determined to play my main guy more now just to upset the balance back in my favor.