Her Name’s Oliveta, And She’s A Shaman

And she is what makes the “We” in my last post. I am not sure how I missed giving her the shout out she deserves. Mayhaps it has to do with writing the blog post at five in the morning.

Still. No excuses.

Blog posts speak louder than words.

No wait. Uhm.

Text… speaks louder than… ahh, bugger it.

For those of you who still remember the history of yours truly, I was in a guild called “Lost Cause” from about late level 40-ish to level cap. This guild was led by “Oliveta“, shammy extraordinaire and one of the coolest people I know.

And hey. She, or her elemental, have tanked bosses all the way from that overweight two headed ogre guy to the end boss of Old Hillsbrad. Seemingly whenever the actual tank (usually a Prot Pally) failed, there was Oli, leaping to the rescue.

I guess it’s kind of a waddle. But a threatening one.

We also shared our very first Tier 5 raiding instance together, and we happily wiped on Hydross for hours! it was so much fun.

On a more specific note, the last blog post came almost entirely from a late night conversation between us.

Hence my chagrin at why a shout out wasn’t included.

Oh, and it gets better.

Oli was also the one who encouraged me to even do up this blog.

Everyone should go over to her site here and demand she update her blog. After all, without Oli’s influence, there wouldn’t even BE a Critical QQ.

/sheepish grin

While We’re Talking About Hero Classes…

I do have one gripe that honestly has nothing to do with the Death Knight class, but rather with other classes relative to the death knight.

Upon release, the Death Knights are going to have their own little quest hub, with their own special little quests and so forth that teach you the class and so on.

Essentially, playing the Death Knight will feel like you’re actually playing a Death Knight, as opposed to the majority of WoW, which plays like player character X killing mob Y for NPC Z.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticizing the formula, it works, and more often then not, is fun, and Blizzard does an excellent job of making the grind feel very non grind like. Well, I mean relative to something like, say, Half Life 2, it’s filled with grinding, but take something like Hello Kitty Island Adventure… you get what I mean.

DK Info Released, Mages Enter Panic Mode

So some new information about the Death Knight Final Form class has hit the intarwebs. This article here at TenTonHammer is an excellent summary of the newly revealed Death Knight information, and why the tears have begun to flow across the mage boards.

Well, flowing more. Often.

Maybe there’s gnashing of teeth now?

Ok, so the Mage boards haven’t changed at all, but nonetheless, here’s what’s scaring people.

Baited Mage Table

Special thanks to Mgblair of Envious, from the Shadowsong server, for this little ditty.

Baited Mage Table.
Costs 860 mana.
Reagent: Warrior Tears.
Creates a mage table that the mage’s enemies can click on. And lo, they consume, only to find filthy maggots within!
Debuff: Causes puking. Unable to react for 5 seconds. Would prefer to die anyway.

Shattered Sun Pendant - Initial Impressions

I’m looking at this baby here.

There’s the obvious attractions to it. 37 spell damage? Tasty on so many levels. Well, ok, just one level, but it’s a damn fine level.

What I’m truly concerned with here is the Scryer proc. I could care less about the Aldor one (they’re way too fancy pants for my tastes). Basically what happens is your shiny new necklace will shoot an Arcane Bolt at you’re target, dealing some odd damage. This some odd damage is capable of critical strikes, and can be partially resisted. I have yet to see a full miss, but presumably it will miss, at least, 1% of the time.

So I took it with me to Mount Hyjal, just to see what it does on a raid wide level.

From the first trash pull to Rage Winterchill getting the smackdown, the Pendant procced 13 times, for a total of 5,616 damage, averaging 395 damage per hit. The highest crit I saw was 469 damage, although it displayed only 7% critical strike rate.

Which is easily explained by the fact it only fired 13 times. But still. Seems kinda low. Not like my fireball here, which displayed a 42% crit rate for the night…

The Arcane Bolt never missed (again we only have 13 bolts to go on), but we did see one partial resist.

This Pendant definitely seems worth it. I’m going to pay Dr. Boom a visit sooner or later to get a lot more data on this little Pendant of mine.

And if you happen to have some WWS data of this, I’d definitely like to know how it performs.

Essentially, I’m trying to decide if it would be better to go with the Shattered Sun Pendant, or the Hellfire Encased Pendant off the trash in Mount Hyjal… 51 fire damage is very tasty…

Le Internetz, It Duz Nuh Thingk!

This has been a very strange week for me.

I dislocated my shoulder (the right one), which is rather odd since a year ago, almost to the day, I dislocated my right elbow. This frightens me on several levels. If this blog is still next April/May, I’m sure I’ll be sitting here chatting about how I dislocated my right knee or ankle or, I dunno, eardrum or something.

So natch, go to the hospital, get some Morphine pumped into me, then pan killer drugs for the rest of the month. So I started out the week in a… mentally altered state. This was Monday, by the way. Or Tuesday. It was near the starting of the week, and it wasn’t Sunday. It was definitely before Wednesday, because I was playing Half Life 2 then. I think.

Want Some Drama? Have Some Drama!

I am currently getting some film together to make some magely type videos, and while waiting for the defrag to finish up it’s delicious work, I decided to mull over Duskwood’s forums. And BEHOLD! Drama!

So it seems that some people were extremely sore about being booted from Anathema, and made some rather hurtful posts about it.

As quoted below:

I Promise I’ll Do Something Constructive

Just not today.

Two quick things to note: I loathe Magister’s Terrace, so much. Maybe it’s just me, but there seems to be so many pulls in there that are like “Ok, in this next pull, we have EVERY SINGLE CLASS IN THE GAME and they all roll a six sided dice every four seconds, and if they roll a three or a six, will instantly attack the squishiest member of the raid with an ability that does 5 bajillion damage.”

Seriously. Screw you, Glaive Throw, screw you.

Attempted to do some Warsong Gulch. Played about 5 matches before I’d had enough. A pair of night elf druids who obviously had a GM cast “Total invulnerability to absolutely everything” on them went and dominated our puny attempts to defend our flag. Match five saw them joined by a resto shaman… yeah.

In other news I started up a Paladin. Retribution spec, obviously. I cannot resist the Ret…

Level 18, and enjoying it supremely.

It’s also an interesting change of pace to have a sexy bum.

How To Make Fire Really Overpowered

So I was just doing some goofing off here, and had a cool thought. Rather than trying to balance all the classes, why not make every class ridiculously overpowered? That’ll be fun! So I thought of some really cool talents to add to the fire tree to make a Fire specced mage the most powerful DPS class the World of Warcraft has ever known!

Improved Fireball: Fireball critical strikes increase fire damage dealt to the target until 4 non-periodic sources of fire damage are applied. This effect lasts for 15 seconds.

Soul of Flame: Gives your Fireball critical strikes a 100% chance to reduce the cast time of your next fireball by .5 seconds.

Combustion: When activated, guarantees a critical strike on your next three fire spells.

Inferno: You have a 25% chance to increase your fire spell damage by 105 whenever a critical strike occurs. This effect lasts 8 seconds.

Searing Heat: Your fire spells have a 100% chance to apply the Searing Heat effect. This effect increases the chance that fire spells will critically strike by 2%. Stacks up to 5 times. Effect lasts 20 seconds.

Flamecaller: Your fireball spell has a 10% chance to instantly cast a second fireball. This effect does not cost mana, produce threat, and is incapable of a critical strike.

WHO’S OVERPOWERED NOW?! HAHAHAHAHAHAAA!!!!

Exciting News!

Check me out! Ain’t I sexy!

Shattered Sun title, and the rofflecopter. My life is complete.

I had originally intended this photo to be taken in Blade’s Edge, but then this happened…

Can’t win them all, I guess.