MotW

You thought I forgot didn't you?

Yes I realize there's alot of posts today but it's a good day.

This week's movie has two purposes the first obviously is because it's a great flick with fun characters, great one liners and good action. The second is to celebrate the great movies that were done by Heath Ledger who passed away this week due to unfortunate circumstances.

Go out and rent this, the soundtrack itself is worth it.

Moonkin on the brain

I found some older Shifting Perspective articles that I thought would be helpful for the moonkin gear.


Awesome Moonkin Gear Part 1

Awesome Moonkin Gear Part 2

Awesome Moonkin Gear Part 3

I'm setting this up for you, the reader, as much as for myself since I begin Outlands tonight.

End of an Era

When I wake up in the morning, I watch the news. I want to make sure that my way to work isn’t going to have serious issues. Brush my teeth, take a shower, brush my hair and get a bite to eat.

It’s not until I get to work and login to my work station that I see the goings on of my favorite blogs and catch up with the people that I consider friends in a far away type of situation.

Laser Chicken has been one of my favorites because Delos has a good sense of humor and because he has very good information for a balance druid that I obviously need at this time.

Today he has let us know that we’re losing him as part of the WoW community. I applaud his last entry into Laser Chicken and his reasoning for leaving the game and the WoW blog community. I will miss his game insight however and I feel that as a community we’ve lost a great player. I hope the best for him. I’ll be looking for Balance Druid entries on his blog and pasting them into mine to keep for posterity, you’ll know the blog comes from him since I’ll preface it.

Good luck Delos, I wish you the best mate.

Comic Assets Column up!

My latest column about comics is up and going on Comixtreme.

The column overall deals with pricing and value of comics. This week I'm dealing with the fallout of the Spider-Man status quo begin changed.

Take a gander if it pleases ya!

Comic Assets: What do I do with my collection now?

Moonkin Battleground Diaries and Macros!

I’m almost positive that I’ve mentioned before my disdain for PVP. Now that doesn’t mean I turn my nose up at people that play PVP. I honestly think it takes a certain mentality to play PVP non stop and I respect the players that can do it day in and day out for hours on end. I inspect a lot of the players that I run with and admire and notice that many of them have gone out and spent time in the battlegrounds because its PVP related gear.

I’ve tried to PVP. Honestly I have. I tried with Luciel, that didn’t go too well. I tried to McGregor but since he’s protection specced it’s not the best way to PVP. I know that there’s certain ways to spec for PVP but am I willing to spend 10, 15 or even 50g to respec every time I want to do something? Um, that would be a no.

So Bosque is close to 60, 56 at the moment and certainly 60 within a matter of days. I decided that I wanted to get him a PVP mount. Why? Well, I have a cat mount and I’d like something different for him to set him apart from the pack, so I want to get him a Ram. It’s 30 battle tokens from each battleground that’s available to me at the moment, with no honor points being spent. Have I mentioned that there’s a nice staff that I want to get him once he hits 70? Not to mention some nice idols that would be perfect for him?

So the last three nights I’ve gone into the battlegrounds. I’ve gone in with some hesitation because honestly, I feel like I suck at PVP. Even dueling friends I get schooled constantly. So going into PVP, you either have it, or you don’t. I love to play PVE because once you memorize the way that the script is written, well then you’ve got it beat. With another player controlling a toon it’s different because you don’t know when they’re going to pop a pot or when they’re going to stun you, backstab, backstab, pounce, evade, pot and then backstab again. There’s no rhyme or reason to his game play that you can see and then not only are you stuck figuring out what your own strategy is going to be but you’re forced to figure his out as well in the short amount of time that you’re going to be confronting that person. (Is it me or am I over thinking this completely?)

With Bosque, I’ve found that I’m a pretty decent at PVP when I’m working with Bosque. The reason being is that I’m a hybrid. While I am specced Balance and I TOTALLY love it, I still have available the other skills of the different trees available to me. I’ve been focusing on two battlefields Arathi Basin and Alterac Valley. Before I had focused on Warsong Glutch but I’ve begun to notice that it’s almost like a solo battleground when you’re doing WSG because everyone is doing, whatever. You have fourteen people on offense and one person on defense, the flag is almost always taken and we, Alliance, have this RETARDED sense of having to turtle when we have the opponent’s flag!

The first Battleground that I did with Bosque, Alterac Valley, we won. I mean we straight just won. Three tokens in my bag right off the bat. I think I ended up in about five battlegrounds for the day and had about 150 kills. Pretty decent for a first day try at least I think.

Yesterday though was the kicker. I work late on Tuesdays, until 8pm and then have to turn around and go back into work at 8am. So my time is short Tuesday evenings. The missus is still recovering from her hospital stay so she was sound asleep. With little time to really do quests, I turned to Battlegrounds again. I ran Alterac Valley three times last night because I want to have the experience of some one on one fighting as well as taking some bases.

I wish I had a screen capture for what I’m about to tell you but you’ll have to take my word for it. We won two I believe, but on the second one, the one that lasted the longest, when the totals came up I placed tenth on damage. Tenth out of thirty. Remember that I’m still a 56 and there were more 59s than anything else on the board and I out damaged twenty of those players.

Can you say shock? Can you say awesome?

With the love of PVP in my heart at the moment, I decided to throw the druids that are Balance and mosey on in here a bone with a quick script.

/castsequence reset=5 Entangling Roots, Moonfire, Wrath

This is a PERFECT battleground macro. It puts the three bread and butter casts that you’re going to use at the touch of one click. At least, if you’re a caster. After this you can just Wrath, Wrath, and Wrath away. It’s the one that uses the least mana and the quickest cast you’re going to find in your repertoire

For Feral, it could go either way.

/castsequence reset=5 Prowl, Pounce, Shred, Claw, Rake, Claw Rake, Rip

If you don’t have pounce yet you can just omit it and just use shred as a starter. If you don’t want to deal with prowl or being behind someone just use Claw, Rake, Claw, Rake, rip.

For the Bears.

/castsequence reset=5 Charge, Faerie Fire, Maul, Swipe, Demoralizing Roar, Bash, Swipe, Maul

Again, if one of the first two aren’t available to you yet, you can change those out or even add on as you get higher in level, likewise with Cat form. The joy of these kind of macros is that the spells cast are incredibly interchangeable and allow you the flexibility to switch them on the fly. So, say you try this combo but you don’t have Ravage and you want it, simple, if you get dusted, which you will with a battleground, as you’re waiting for the spirit healer to bring you back quickly open your macros window and write it in.

Let me know Druids if these work for you. Like I said, I know basic macros and I know there are other macros to switch forms on the fly but damned if I know what they are.

Think I might have to change my logo to, what do you guys think? I want some responses or emails or something, geez!

Boomkin say what?

As you know I had a hiatus, if you didn’t know it says so on my OTHER post today….scroll down.

During my time at home, with the kids asleep and me already having caught up with my wife, I took the time to kill stuff on my Druid. If you look over you’ll see that I went from forty-six to fifty-six. Yep, you heard right since the last post to last night I leveled 10 times. That just tells me that the fix that Blizz put in with 2.3 actually works and it makes it a lot faster to level. Now the question becomes, how many times are we willing to go through that content for these characters? Personally it’s been a blast with Bosque but that’s because the build is so much fun and because I’m learning a new class. I don’t know that I’d have this much fun with a clothy though I have three in the wings that are looking at me like I’m crazy for not having leveled them sooner but honestly, they don’t hold a huge draw for me.

Bosque has already begun to get critical hits for over 1k in almost every battle. What’s not to love about that? The one complaint that I have is that roots doesn’t work indoors and that sometimes the mobs resist and that drives me nuts. Usually though I can have a mob down even before it reaches me, which is awesome. Being an Alchemist is also good since what it does it allows me to have pots all the time.

I ran him through BRD this weekend and while I didn’t really get any drops for myself, I got some good xp and managed to complete all of the quests down there.

At this rate he should hit seventy in the next few weeks. It’s been slower going with some of the areas because I’m rusty but with Outlands so fresh in my mind I should blow through those with no problem whatsoever.

The other thing that I’ve begun to do is PVP. I’m not one to really PVP. I find that the mechanics are clunky and I don’t want to just build a toon for PVP as I know I won’t spend HOURS in a battleground. However I find myself being much more useful with a Moonkin as I can just go ahead and blast everything around me, or root people to the ground that love to jump around so that they aren’t being smacked around. In the two days that I’ve gone ahead and PVP’d I’ve gotten over 1000 honor points and several marks. My goal is to go ahead and get enough marks to get a pvp mount when I hit 60 or so and then horde the honor points for when I hit 70 and I want to get some nice gear. There’s already a staff that I’ve got my eye on so I know that I can accomplish this.

Any of my fellow druids enjoy the moonkin love or is it just me?

Absenteeism

So readers of the blog will notice that last week was a slim week for me in the way that I usually try to put out something each day or every other day. Unfortunately the Hooved Missus ended up in the hospital for about four days and that made me at home dad, having to call out from work and take care of the kids. I still managed to play some WoW but my head was not into the whole writing thing so I apologize to all of you for that but I hope you understand.

Not sure if you want to know but the missus suffers from Crone’s. This is a highly painful disease of the bowel that can flare up and basically block part of your intestine up. Last week on Monday night we rushed in to the ER with all the symptoms of a flare up. She was so bad when she got to the ER that even though there was a four hour wait to be seen, they rushed her into a room and decided almost immediately to hospitalize her. The good thing is that she was taken excellent care of and I was able to take the time off to take care of the kids at home and go see her when I was relieved of duty by my sister in law or mother in law. She came home Friday night and it gave me a chance to help her get back into the swing of things before I had to get back to work today.

This week I should be back to business as usual.

That being said there are some different things that have gone on that I want to let you in on and either laugh with me or just get straight up confused.

As you know I like to do pugs. Not as much like to as I have no other choice sometimes due to the lack of time, guildies or just straight patience to wait for a group of guildies to be freed up to do anything. Worst part about running anything is the wait that comes between getting a full group together and then getting to the stone, making sure everyone is repaired, with plenty of food and water, ready to be summoned to begin the instance. That happens with guildmates or with puggers. For some reason, I don’t care who you are, what realm you’re in or what faction you play on, it’s one of the banes of the game, waiting for an instance.

This weekend I ended up going on several instance runs. First McGregor was asked to tank for some key frags for Kara. As you all know he’s gotten the three key fragments but needs Old Hill and Black Morass before he can be Kara worthy. (Not to mention getting up his defense rating up to 490, it currently stands at 426) So I stop working on my druid, hope on to McG and help out some people in the sister guild to get their fragments. About ten minutes into SV our healer says he has to go eat dinner. So we’re screwed. Seriously we were screwed when the group was put together. We had three hunters and two paladins. What kind of a set up is that? It could work for SV but for ARC? Or even OH or BM for that matter? Yea no, I don’t see it happening. Turns out the only person that needed those two fragments is the healer that went to dinner. Yea, that teaches me to be nice.

McG did have one other outing during the weekend. One of my guildies was running Ramps and ran into an issue with the last boss, that is, the last boss kept kicking their ass. I ran in with McG and put the smack down on that dragon, didn’t even use my lay on hands or a pot, very sweet.

Luciel is still dormant. Honestly I love him but I’m waiting to see if some kind of fix gets put in for Shamans because I simply refuse to be a healbot all the frickin’ time. I think that healers just have it bad now because anytime something goes wrong with a five man, even if the tank sucks or the dps isn’t that great the finger gets pointed RIGHT at the healer, that’s not something that I want to deal with.

/end rant