Circelyn - Storytime

I entered the writing contest from Blizzard. Since I didn't win (or get honorable mention or anything special), I figured I would post the story here. It will be in parts since it would become a rather long post otherwise.

First part after the break! (BTW I am 100% sure that I didn't win because I live in the EU, and those tickets would've cost too much! otherwise, surely I would've had first price...maybe...uhm...yeah, believe in yourself! right?)

Speed, stam or more damage?

I'm playing with a little worgen warrior on the beta and I just completed the spirit binding. It's a quest...well...I won't spoil all the surprises. Suffice to know that at the end of it you can choose between 3 permanent buffs that will be up whenever you're in darkshore afterwards.

Increased movement speed by 10% (elk), Increased damage (cat), or increased health (bear). I cannot possibly imagine chosing anything but the speed increase since that's the only one that will benefit me at later levels.

But wouldn't it be an interesting choice to make for your character at creation stage? Imagine that you could chose between 10% movement speed increase, 1% more health, or 1% more damage...all the time.

Which one would you pick?

Yessss!!

Healers Unite

I call to all healers out there!

When you come into a pug group and you find someone ignoring the mustknows for Cataclysm.

So basically when others are being asses, completely disrespectful of the healer role (or even the tank). Leave. 

Let them know why and leave. Just let them deal with having to find a different healer and overthink their sins. We bring the light and everything that is holy, they should respect us lifegivers!

Let us get back a little power.

Don't just ramble at the back, scrambling to get your loot because the rest has moved on already. Just leave.

Time for us to become Diva's again. We deserve that respect. We have one of the harder roles in that group and if dps or tank goes dumb just let them deal with the consequences.

Don't torture yourself, and lets stop sacrificing ourselves! We are worthy as much of having fun during a run as the dps is, and if they decide to spoil it...well....leave.

(Of course when there's only one that is being a dick you can also kick.)

10 mustknows for Cataclysm

I just healed a dungeon on beta as disc (lvl 85, fully heroic gear). and it's hard. And yes, I ended up with a group of idiots that had a tank that pulled a boss while he was at half health, and where only one of the dps listened when I asked them to please eat up after pulls. 

They're now stuck having to find a different healer. And I'm gonna have to see if holy is equally painstalkingly tiringly hard as disc. 

And oh...yes, it might just become harder to find healers than tanks. I know that my queuing on the healers that I have on beta is instaqueue almost every time, and on the druid tank I've had to wait several times. (but hey, that might be my timezone).

Behind the cut 10 pieces of advice on how not to behave around your healer....or you might just have to wait in queue again to find another. 

My Most Memorable Moments of Amazement

WoW.com's breakfast topic today is memorable moments in World of Warcraft. When I was reading through some of the replies I was thinking of what I regarded as my own most memorable moments and I have to say I have quite a couple of them.

Some made me feel all emotional, yaknow swollen throat and 'those are some hefty spices in that uhm...drink, no they're not tears!' kinda moments. Others have made me feel abandoned and alone, and yet others have made me angry or frustrated.

Below the cut three of my most memorable moments of amazement.

Power Auras for Holy - For real this time!

As holy I seem to have a million cooldowns and timers to watch, and eventually I'm guessing it will get better once my internal timer starts getting used to them again, but for now I created some handy visual cues.

This does require some understanding of addons, and I do make use of the fact that I use a barmod. (Dominos).

Blizzard Pumpkin Contest

Sorry readers, servers are down and I am bored....

Sooo...inspired by the pumpkin contest from Blizzard I figured I would add some of my own pumpkins.

You'll be stuck with pumkins until Halloween is over.

I promise the pumkins will disappear again after...

(I am not promising they won't turn into christmas trees or so)

Anybody out there planning on participating still? I thought about it, but I am more likely to lose a couple of fingers than to get a pretty carved pumpkin out of it.

I went through the galleries though and there sure are some gorgeous designs out there. If you're bored like me, go check them out :)

Powerauras for Holy

Yar, I had a pretty post planned with the power auras that I've set up yesterday for my brand new holy spec, buuuut the servers are down. Durr...I sort of forgot.

But hey, that's ok I'll go play on beta, lets copy over one of the new raidready characters...

Waaah! Battlenet is also down? o_O So there went my idea of copying for beta.

Does make me wonder though. Aren't the other games like Starcraft and Diablo linked to battlenet too? And does this mean that Blizzard is really dumb enough to shut all their games down at the same time? Do they want us to go to different games or so?

Bah.

Edit: oh, powerauras will come soon, hopefully tomorrow :)

From Disc to Holy

dI've been disc ever since the last BC patch. I loved penance, and when I heard that CoH went to a cooldown...well, that was the end of Holy for me. I was disc before the majority became disc, and I was good at it.

I can probably still be good at it, but my shields are currently doing a bit more than half of what they were doing before the patch, atonement isn't working in a raid environment due to the range limitation (or at all at times it seems), shields are so not worth casting...I didn't even take the strength of soul target on beta anymore, and the rest of the spec seems...well, boring.

Sooo...I'll be playing with holy.

New Hyperbole and a Half

Wooot! I've said it before, but I'll say it again. Go read this blog. Just makes me fall of my chair laughing!

The violet proto drake stays, and the achievement what a long strange trip will reward flying!

Also...murloc hunter anyone?

Blizzard Luuuurves the Ugly!

With the patch in I have, of course, been prodding my new priest abilities. But since I'm in beta I've already played quite a bit with the priest and I figured it was time my other characters got some playtime. So I logged in the hunter and specced, glyphed, etc.

Ready to go, right? Wrong.

Oh dear, spotlights on my shoulders!

The helmet isn't so much the problem (I can turn it off after all), but gosh those shoulders. What is that? Spotlights? Blue puddles? My bum will be wet constantly if I decide to even move with that blue glowing water up there! Wow...

I do like the color scheme though, and as said the helmet is okish..though why that antenna needs to be on the forehead...no idea.

What I do to fall asleep

I was poking my blog reader today and ended up on Need More Rage as I seem to quite often lately. And while trying to decide whether I wanted to leave a comment on his new pet I scrolled down to check out his sidebar. I like seeing what people have in their sidebar, and often I find new blogs through other people's blogrolls.

I scrolled all the way down, and instead of a blog I found this. I thought Ratshag was suspiciously active already! So when I clicked through to this page I started reading a little. Now, I have entered NaNoWriMo once. I didn't manage to finish my book within the month, but I did finish the book.

Of course I was way too insecure to actually do something with it back then, and now...well, I dream about becoming a professional writer, but don't we all?

Anyway, I joined up (in good time too, apparently gifst are handed out in November!) and looked around a bit more. They have a nice page of prompts, so I took the one of today and added it in as the title of today's post. Now I still have to find something to write with it.

Patch 4.01 this week - the highlights

Extended maintenance tomorrow, so we're all expecting the patch to drop tomorrow. But before this happens I figured I would go through a couple of things once more that had me worried myself. I got the answers, so I figured I would sooth other people's minds as well.

The list below is just highlighting things that I found confusing myself and that I went out to hunt information about. If you're unsure about anything still, leave a comment and I'll try to hunt down an answer for you.

And remember, this information comes from the PTR patch notes, blue posts, beta experience, etc. I too have to wait for the patch to actually drop to read the exact patch notes. So if something does turn out to be different (because they always do) don't blame the messenger.

12 million subscribers! - but for how long?

WORLD OF WARCRAFT^® SUBSCRIBER BASE REACHES 12 MILLION WORLDWIDE

IRVINE, Calif. -- October 7, 2010 Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. announced today that the subscriber base for World of Warcraft^®, its award-winning massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), now exceeds 12 million players worldwide. This milestone was reached in the wake of the mainland Chinese launch of World of Warcraft's second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King^®, and also as global anticipation continues to mount for the December 7 release of the game's third expansion,Cataclysm^™.

"The support and enthusiasm that gamers across the world continue to show for World of Warcraft reaffirms our belief that it offers one of the best entertainment values available today," said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. "We are as committed as ever to taking the game to new heights, and we look forward to demonstrating that with Cataclysm in December."

Since debuting in North America, Australia, and New Zealand on November 23, 2004, World of Warcraft has become the most popular subscription-based MMORPG around the world. It was the bestselling PC game of 2005 and 2006 worldwide, and finished behind only World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade^®, the first expansion pack for the game, in 2007. For 2008, the World of Warcraft series represented three of the top five bestselling PC games, with Wrath of the Lich King finishing the year at #1, and in 2009, World of Warcraft titles claimed three of the top six spots.*

World of Warcraft is currently available in eight languages and is played in North America, Europe, mainland China, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Chile, Argentina, and the regions of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau.

To keep pace with the continued growth of World of Warcraft as well as development on other Blizzard Entertainment games, the company is currently hiring for numerous open positions. More information on career opportunities available at Blizzard Entertainment can be found at www.blizzard.com/jobs.

For further information on World of Warcraft, The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, and Cataclysm, please visit the official website at www.worldofwarcraft.com. (source)

My prediction is that if they don't retune the Cata dungeons and heroics so that they won't take 3 hours and have 5 minute runbacks after a wipe, they will rapidly lose a lot of subscribers about 2 months into the expansion.

(B)Logging in to Real Life

Thror and myself have started a new blog. No idea how often we will be posting, and no idea what the general content will be about. Probably just random stuff from our non-wow life.

Reason? Well, I felt like it, and I needed a spot to get spout my thoughts that have nothing to do with World of Warcraft. I didn't want to clutter up this blog too much with non-wow related posts, so a new place. A place for us together and a place where we can ramble on about our frustrations with all the sarcasm we can muster.

And yes, of course I can shamelessly plug my other blog. They're my blogs after all.

Go check it out (or not) at (B)Logging in to Real Life.

(oh, and let me know if stuff's not working as it should)

Cleanup on the Blogroll

I went through my list of blogs that I read and I noticed how many blogs are just blabbering on about all sorts of stuff I'm not even interested in reading any longer. So I've cleared up my blog list and will start adding new ones as I find them.

A couple I will definitely leave on them, just because they are still good to read, and I figured they deserved a special shoutout here...

World of Matticus

I cannot always agree with what is written here. And I sometimes wonder if he's in my head (I find posts there that I've been struggling to write and all of a sudden it shows up on this blog so I'll just discard them at that point), but the blog is consistently well written, and speaks about Worlf of Warcraft at least. Definitely something to subscribe to even though you might still skip a post at times.

The Pink Pigtail Inn

Larissa has some of the sharpest views on things out there. Mostly they are related to World of Warcraft in some way, and while this is definitely not about tactics or anything the stuff she writes is good to read. And oh...make sure to read the comments too, she has quite a few readers and it's funny to see how some things get discussed.

Righteous Orbs

I was reading this blog already when it was still called 'Standing in the back in my Sissy Robes'. Not sure if I got all the capitals right, but eh. The blog deals with situations in game, written from his point of view. Often very funny to read since he seems to have a nice dose of sarcasm in his pocket which is sprinkled freely throughout the posts.

Kaliope's WoW Crafting Blog

It's still my go to blog for the newest information on trade skills in WoW. Not only because this blog gives up to date information, but also because of the effort put in discovering all of it.

Krasus Chronicles

I've been following this blog for a while now, and while it isn't updated too often, I do enjoy following her story. Sort of like a soap series sometimes I guess.

Need More Rage

Last of the WoW blogs, but definitely not least, a blog that manages to make me giggle with every single post. I always hope I find a new post on this blog when I go through my reader just because they brighten up my day. Short and funny. Go there!

Hyperbole and a Half

Not a World of Warcraft blog, but everybody should read this. It's had me crying with tears of laughter just because it's sooo true. Well written, immensely funny, and you gotta love the drawings with the posts.

Anyway, that's it for today. I had some whiney post about Cataclysm in my head, but I've decided against it. I remember my feelings when Wrath was coming up all too well, and I'm thinking that I'll wait and see. I can still cancel the subscription when it really turns sour I won't have to cry out about it beforehand.

Enjoy your day!