Mend Pet

Wednesday night, Razorblade Arcade took advantage of the raid lockout extension feature to finally push through Singdragosa. With new Frost Resistance gear for our tanks and an improved block placement strategy, we were able to get her down on just the second attempt… and that left us with just the Lich King.

That’s when I realized – this is the last boss! We’re about to BEAT THE GAME. This is really significant to me, as I have a nasty habit of not finishing games of any type. Whether it’s because I don’t want it to end or because something new takes my inerest, I just never seem to reach the “final boss”.

World of Warcraft has been no different. In Vanilla, I was no where near the end of the game (mind you, not many were.) In Burning Crusade, I wasn’t even ready to set foot in the final raid dungeon. But Wrath has opened a lot of doors for a lot of people, and I am glad of that. There’s a feeling of conclusion to a story this time around, and I am a bit humbled by it.

I’m both excited to finally kill the last boss, and also scared to be finished. I know there will still be plenty of things for me to do, alts and hard modes waiting to be taken on, but this really is the end of the core story until the next expansion.

This demonstrates the strengths of this expansion. Yes, I’ve had issues with how raids have been released, and the 10 vs 25 setup has had it’s faults, but I think Blizzard has accomplished what they set out to do: All players, no matter how much or little they play the game, have the ability to follow a whole story through questing, dungeons and all the way to the final encounter.

I really hope they’re able to build a similar feeling with Cataclysm, even though they can’t have quite as interesting a villain to focus on as Arthas.

Last  night I raided from someone else’s computer.  His computer is way better than mine, and I think you could fit my monitor into his at least twice.  So visually, it was pretty sweet.

However, he’s got some issues with his sound card.  Everything has this annoying echo.  So while I tried to play normally for a bit, I eventually gave in and turned my game sounds off – I even turned vent down and could barely make out a word from it.

I am not used to playing without game sounds – and it really does change the game for me.  For example, I have become accustomed to hitting Feign Death whenever I hear Omen’s “WATCH YOUR THREAT!” sound.  Sure, I still had the flashing red on my screen, but it just wasn’t enough.

Even the sound of my arrows going off helps me know that things are going right.  If I don’t hear my arrows shooting, I know I need to pay more attention – am I web wrapped or stunned?  Am I facing the wrong way?

It’s amazing how I’ve adapted my play style to use my various senses.  I found myself getting a bit overwhelmed by how much I needed to watch the screen, when usually I leave some things to be taken care of by my ears.

Next challenge: Play with my monitor turned off and use only audio signals. 

When was the last time you queued for a battleground?  The other day I decided to try Isle of Conquest, and I hopped in the queue.  And that’s when I realized how spoiled the new Dungeon Finder has made us: it’s “Estimated wait times” are actually pretty accurate with that system.  But for BGs, the queue timer has been useless since the day it came out.

Here’s where I think it fails.

See that Last 10 players note?  What does that even mean? It’s a ambiguous.  For a BG like Isle of Conquest, which requires 40 people per side… how does the average over the last 10 players help me?  It doesn’t.  This number means nothing.  All it does it give people a false sense that they might get into the battleground in that time, while in truth only about the last five people to queue had wait times below that time.  The other 35 had to wait much longer.

They seem to have managed to get the estimation working for Dungeon Finder, why they haven’t just ported that system over to the BG queue is beyond my ken.  In fact, it might be simpler because there are no roles defined or needed, just numbers.

They should either improve this estimation or remove it entirely.

It’s been a few months since the latest overhaul of misdirect (v1 being the 2 min cooldown 3-charge style, v2 with 30 sec cd and 3-charge).  I was unsure how I’d feel about this new Tricks of the Trade version, and I’m still not completely used to it. On the surface, it almost feels just like the old MD, but there are a few small but noticeable things that I miss.  Allow me expatiate on them:

No cooldown. Ever since the cooldown went from 2 min to 30 seconds, I have become used to being able to pop MD while waiting for the tank to pull, and if it expired before he pulled I could just pop another right back up. Not anymore! While it seems like there’s still just a 30 second cooldown on MD, the 30 seconds doesn’t begin counting until your MD has expired (either through using it or through it falling off). This means if the tank takes 31 seconds to get ready to pull, I have to wait half a minute before I can put MD back up.

Selective MDing. This is a pretty specific case, but it still happens. An example is when we were working on Blood Princes. I was happy to help the shadow tank by MDing the purple balloons to him, but that would have been a lot easier with the old misdirect. Since it was 3 shots, I could take my time and target 3 different things with each shot and send them over to their target. But now I’ve only got 4 seconds, which really only lets me grab 1, maybe 2 if they’re close together.  Also used to do this when farming Gorillas with my Gorilla.

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of benefits to make up for it – the most important being:

Volley! Need I say more?

Multiple MDs from multiple hunters. Boostah and I used to have a nasty habit of casting MD at the same time back in my 25-man days, which you might remember caused them to actually cancel each other out sometimes.  It was almost not noticeable (until one of the hunters gets aggro off the bat, of course).

What do you think?

When Blizzard added Achievements in patch 3.0, they also added a less noticed feature called “Statistics”.  It’s that fun little page that tells you how many times you’ve killed Hogger, and how many times you’ve died to falling damage (5 for me…)  Of course, it only records your statistics starting from patch 3.0, so all the stuff you did before then doesn’t matter, unfortunately.

Well, the other day while I was waiting in the Random Heroic queue, I decided to have a closer look at my statistics, and I found a few interesting things.

First, under the “Player vs. Player > World” tab:

No world honorable kills?  Hm, that’s odd.

But on the “Kills > Honorable Kills” tab:

Well, that’s a bit better.  I guess all but 6 of my kills are in Wintergrasp?  Because I clearly didn’t get 773 kills from Northrend any other way on a PvE server…

Alright, moving on… if you know anything about me, you know that I don’t do Arenas.  I’ve set my foot in their once, right after they were released in BC, and that was it.  But since it was so long ago, it shouldn’t be on my statistics page.

From the “Player vs Player > Rated Arenas” tab:

Woo!  They got one right this time!

From the “Kills > Honorable Kills” again:

Well, 1 out of 4 isn’t bad…. (did I mention the 1 time I did arenas, it was 5v5?)

Now, from under “Deaths > Arenas”:

I bet I’d have a pretty good arena rating if I’d really killed 25 but only died 3 times!

Now, time for a quick math lesson:

779 + 294 + 957 = 1792, right?  WRONG!  It equals 2030.  That means my “Total Honorable Kills” is off by 238.  It would have made more sense if it was 294, meaning the weren’t counting my imaginary arenas, but no:  238.

One last thing… I can’t really say whether this is true or not.  But either way, it makes me sad that almost 30% of my player deaths have been caused by MY OWN FACTION: