Thanks for the Good Times Everyone, Time to Move On

I considered doing one of those “I’m leaving WoW now, see ya!” type posts as a joke for April Fool’s day, but in light of recent events that probably wouldn’t be received too well. Even if I went all out and cited the lack of in-game bacon as the primary reason for me quitting.

It would be tasteless and a mockery of my readers. I could honestly give a damn about the former; I’ve never exactly been politically correct or tasteful in my jokes.I mean, hell, I used a German terrorist organization as a throw-away pun.

It’s that latter one that concerns me.

It would be outright cruel to everyone to put up a post like that, no matter the circumstances. So I compromised.

All of you who read the title, I’m sorry for the little freak-out you just had (that last sentence was basically a lie).

No really, I’m sorry (no I’m not).

Seriously brain, shut up (no).

Bah, only BRK can argue with Brain like BRK can. My brain isn’t funny at all, just a huge douchebag.

Yeah, I’m going to deeply miss BRK. He’s passed on the torch, but none of us have big enough shoes and now the forest is on fire.

Or something along those lines. I’m not particularly good at metaphorical language.

Read Full Post »

Orders of Business

Hooooookay.

First, much apologies for the site outage. I’m not sure what happened, I suspect that twitter whatever haberdashery caused some coding issues. A new twitter widget added to wordpress? Then all the wordpress blogs suddenly fail to load? Coincidence? I THINK NOT.

It took something like six hours to even post those four words yesterday or whenever it was. It might have been a few days ago, I dunno; I’ve sort of spent the last 15 hours reading the entirety of Least I Could Do. Not exactly wise to start an archive binge when you first find the comic at 3am.

Dude’s been updating nearly every day since 2003. That’s a lot of damn comics. I think my brain hurts, and I now have a massive repertoire of pick-up lines ranging from terrible to hilariously awful to hate crime.

Secondly, has anyone else seen the Filefront closure? Like… seriously, holy crap, guys! There’s over 48 terabytes of downloadable content there! I can’t… I can’t even imagine how much porn that would store. Unless it’s uncompressed avi files. Then we’d get… what, five hours?

This had better beone of the crueler April Fool’s tricks out there, or I am going to be unreasonably sad at the loss of what is, essentially, a glorified digital museum full of priceless junk.

Some would say “free” or “worthless”, but those people are the same morons who always ask Guitar Hero and Rock Band players “Why don’t you play a real instrument?”

I don’t know, candle wax for brains, why don’t you ask that dude over there playing COD4 why he doesn’t go get a real machine gun and kill people? Why don’t you ask that guy playing Command & Conquer to get a real army of tanks and invade the soviet union?

Read Full Post »

Site Finally Working Again

Sorry about the outage.

😦

Read Full Post »

Free Stuff is Serious Business

So Horns and his friends with unpronounceable names over at Yet Another Warlock Nerf are having themselves a little contest. A contest which, conveniently, involves them giving away stuff for free*.

Now, as Horns bribed asked me to throw them a shout-out, and as a firm believer in free things (especially food), I feel it is my duty to inform the faceless masses. It would be incredibly selfish to keep the free stuff to myself.

Ok maybe not entirely free. You would need to do a bunch of typing about a relevant topic. Which isn’t exactly free, but you aren’t paying for anything! It could also inspire that wannabe blogger inside you. Or at least make him/her/it happy.

You don’t want your inner blogger ripping and tearing it’s way out of your nasal cavities, do you?

No, Calvin, I did not ask you. Sit down. And not on the unicycle this time.

You can find all the details here!

*The Small Print

Freeness not guaranteed. Effort may be required. Entrants must speak English, be able to communicate with proper grammar, be able to spell correctly, free of rampant plagiarism, possess an e-mail, and be able to provide a shiny picture. Picture does not need to be relevant to anything. Please refrain from taking pictures of yourself naked.

Well, I mean, specifically refrain from using naked pictures of yourself for the purposes of posting it on the internet for this contest. Feel free to take naked pictures of yourself any time you want to. It’s not against the law or anything.

Note: please refer to your local laws before making this assumption. I made a similar error when I attempted to engage Japanese royalty in conversation with a puppet of a midget on my left arm.

Though I’d still recommend against posting these naked pictures of yourself on the internet. This isn’t necessarily illegal, but probably a bad idea. (Again, make sure you check your local laws. Do not do what I did, and end up in a jail somewhere with nothing but a novelty pencil to clothe yourself.)

If you really must post pictures of yourself naked on the internet, feel free to send me a link. Or just e-mail them directly to me. I promise I won’t laugh. Unless you tell a joke at the same time. Or hold up a piece of paper with a joke on it in the picture. Or scribble a joke on your naked body somewhere.

Or record a video of you telling a joke while naked. That would actually be awesome.

Please send all videos of naked joke telling to: criticalqq@gmail.com.

Oh yeah, did I mentioned you needed to write something 450 words long? Not hard, this post itself is already 468 words long, and all I did was ramble about naked people.

Read Full Post »

Things I’ve Learned as a Paladin Healer

Yes, I have a paladin. Some of you know that, I suspect some of you don’t. I know for a fact that very, very few of you know that I actually heal on said Paladin.

Heal instances, even.

All if you who just shivered or otherwise suddenly felt a great deal of fear are forgiven. It’s ok. I’m not exactly a very… responsible person when it comes to my actions.

Cue Scholomance flashback:

Tank: “Do we need to kill all the trash first? What happens if we just pull the bosses?”

Me: “Let’s find out!” /cast Frostbolt

(Those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, there’s a room in Scholo with dozens of neutral, non-elite trash mobs. However, they all turn into hostile elites and immediately engage the party if the boss is pulled first. Good times.)

Cue Wailing Caverns flashback:

Healer: “lol ur easy to heal. much harder at 70”

Me (as warrior tank): “Really? Ok” *swaps to 2H weapon and battle stance*

I believe it was Flirt who said “Yeah… I don’t trust you to tank anything.”

Read Full Post »

(Part Three) Nerfy Nerfy Fear Fear

(Sung to the tune of the happy happy joy joy song.)

So FINALLY, after endlessly rambling about stuff, I get to ramble about the specifics. It’s all well and good to call for a split between PvE and PvP, but without giving precise details, I just sound like nut job.

So here we go. Specifics.

1. Eliminate hit mechanics from PvP.

Not all hit mechanics, obviously. Just the base miss chance that all players have against all other players.

Currently, when you cast a spell at an opposing player, you have a 96% chance to hit them. Only 4% of your spells will actually miss, so generally speaking a player without any hit in their PvP gear won’t see very many misses.

What happens to you if that tiny 4% chance to miss pops up right when you cast that super necessary crowd control?

It’s an egregious RNG mechanic that flat out needs to be eliminated. It’s as simple as adjusting a player’s base hit against other players to 100%.

Other than that, nothing else changes. If a DK wants to pick up that Frigid Dreadplate talent, that will continue to work as normal.

Conveniently, this allows for the elimination of all hit from PvP gear, thus placing yet another barrier between PvP and PvE content gear.

Read Full Post »

Nerf Don’t Warlocks, Fear Nerf! (Part Two)

I am of the opinion that PvE and PvP should be kept as separate from each other as possible. To the point where each can be treated as a completely different game from the other.

Imagine how much faster PvE content could be developed and balanced if the developers could tune players and abilities with absolutely no regard to the PvP ramifications.

Imagine how easy it would be to bring frost mages in line with the other specs if they didn’t have to worry about overpowering them in PvP. Or Arms warriors.

Say Ret Paladins are dealing way too much damage in PvP, but are just fine from a PvE standpoint. How do you go about repairing that issue without nerfing PvE damage?

Imagine how easy it would be to solve that issue if nerfing PvP damage didn’t have any effect on raiding paladins.

Imagine all the time and effort currently spent carefully balancing PvE concerns versus PvP concerns. Imagine if, instead of spending hours carefully making sure class X isn’t overpowered in PvP when they receive a slight buff in PvE, they simply buff class X for PvE.

Read Full Post »

Don’t Nerf Warlocks, Nerf Fear! (Part One)

“Nerf fear?!” I can hear the scorned ‘locks cry, “but it’s already such an unreliable spell! And what the hell are you calling for nerfs to it, anyways? Seriously, f*bleep* you and your f*bleepity* Mage Armor!”

(Or Magic Absorption, the two are basically interchangeable at this point.)

Oh, I hear ya. And I agree. In a clutch moment, where you absolutely need that key CC to go off, and seeing “Resist” on your screen has got to be one of the most painful things to experience.

I’ve experienced the same damn thing plenty with Counterspell and Polymorph.

Allow me to illustrate my overall point via a stupid bullet point list thing:

• 30% chance to resist any counterspell effect
• Reduces the duration of any counterspell effect by 30%

Or how about:

• 50% chance that Fear will be resisted
• The duration of Fear reduced by 50%

Or maybe:

Read Full Post »

It’s Like Sunwell All Over Again

Patch 3.1, so far, is trying very hard to restore the age of raiding where warlocks were superior to mages in every regard.

Let’s start broad. Blizzard adopted the philosophy of BTPNTC (bring the player, not the class) and spread around utility abilities to various classes. This way, a raid wouldn’t have to have a shadow priest for mana regen, they could bring a hunter or paladin (and now a mage or warlock) to get the same effect.

A truly excellent idea, that deserved far better execution than it got.

Right from the start. every buff any class brought should have been organized into three categories: absolutely necessary buffs that raids are balanced around, buffs good for min/max players, but won’t really harm the raid too much if they’re missing, and buffs that just have to remain unique.

The first category would contain Replenishment and nothing else. As it’s such an important buff that every mana using class is balanced around it’s presence, this buff should be spread around enough that at least half the classes can bring it. Not necessarily will bring it, but have the option to.

Read Full Post »

Ignite Nerf? What Ignite Nerf?

Mabd asked about the ignite nerf last post. Which confuses me, because there isn’t one.

Or at least, I’m not aware of one. I’m not aware of a great many things, like my dentist appointment next week or that creepy guy who keeps leaving confetti in my mailbox.

There is this:

Ignite: The damage done by this talent no longer receives modifications from effects that increase or decrease damage done by a percentage.

But this doesn’t seem to actually effect anything. All the usualy percentage effects (such as, say Ferocious Inspiration or Ebon Plaguebringer) haven’t changed at all from live to PTR. External effects (such as Malygos’ sparklies) also have no behavioural difference.

Read Full Post »