Had just enough energy for a quick 5 man tonight.  Though 5 mans these days are so boring if it isn’t any of the 3 new ones.  On occasion I’ll get in a group with a poorly geared tank that makes it more interesting but usually I stand around lol  So today I thought I’m going to see if I can beat any of the DPS.  So in between healing I used every trick in the book to do some DPS as Disc of course.  I managed to beat the hunter, and came close during the instance at beating the Warlock, but in the end I couldn’t do it.  I was proud of myself at managing to do 15% of the damage WHILE I was also healing

Also wanted to make a quick longer comment on the new badge changes that Blizzard has posted for Cataclysm.  My first thought was about time!  It seemed the current system was getting ridiculous and if they kept this up we were going to have all sorts of crazy named badges hehe  Its also a pain if you want to get a different item and have to down convert your badges like 3 times for heroic stuff.  It seems like a well thought out plan.  Especially how each time they release a new tier of gear they convert your uper tier badges to lower tier.  This will keep people from hording and get you spending!

It is quite amazing at how many systems they are changing.  I’m really excited and just a tad worried.  My worry lies only in the fact that so much is being changed that testing of it all has got to be a nightmare.  I imagine that there will be a lot of tweaking, more so than normal even when Cataclysm goes live with this many changes.  It’s all good though!

I managed to get on yesterday only long enough to run a quick random.  I was totally worn out from being up till midnight the previous day after being called by work.  It was an interesting run actually.  We had a bear tank that had the highest GS rating I’ve ever seen, and over 60K HP.  He made a mad dash through that instance and we completed it faster than I thought possible.  He skipped the first boss which never even occurred to me They brought down Mr Drake ride immediately too, I was impressed

Things have been very interesting since the announcements about the upcoming raid changes to Cataclysm.  So much whining it is unbelievable, actually I think it is believable because the vocal community is a bunch of whiners   I wonder if Blizzard predicted this or not?  I’m guessing they must have assumed a certain amount of vocal disagreement.  Some of my favorite arguments are:

• It will destroy my guild
• No one will ever do 25 mans anymore
• Why even include 25 mans
• Blizzard is just catering to casuals

The funny thing is the last time they change raids they said the same things.  Just like they said Cataclysm will be the death of WoW, and all previous expansion were going to do that as well   Anyways the most interesting part is everything Blizzard is changing is save guilds if anything.  Lets you do the content you want, with the people you want.  You don’t feel forced into trying to make 25 mans work, and if you have the people for 25 mans you can do it, and gear more people up faster.  I don’t see the issue, and find it funny people can’t see it benefits everyone casual or elitist

As I mentioned before my favorite part is first that you can do the raids you like, I prefer 10mans over 25 by a HUGE margin.  The 25s are just not fun for me, I don’t care how good the gear is.  Second I kind of like the shared lockouts myself.  You don’t feel compelled to have to do both to try and get extra badges.  People will have time for their alts now   It is obvious they had to do that if they were going to make the gear the same.  The other thing that kept coming to mind is that they intended to try and make the difficulty of 10 and 25 man as close as possible.  So the elitist shouldn’t complain they are catering to casuals because they want it to be equal.  Obviously getting 25 people in sync is still always going to be harder than 10, so they are doing a few things to help with extra badges/gear.

Things are really getting exciting with Cataclysm now as this new information comes out almost daily.  Come on Blizzard, I want more!

I was very excited to read the new proposed raiding changes for Cataclysm.  As someone who really enjoys a good 10man raid, and really doesn’t for 25 man it is good news!  The problem I have with 25 mans is it marginalizes my contribution to the overall victory.  I can see the effect of my healing when I am one of 2 or 3, but not when I’m one of 5 or 6.  I also hate all the slowness that comes when dealing with 25 people over 10.  Having 10 is much more manageable and is always more fun to me.  For me anyways it has never bothered me that the gear was slightly lower in level. I still wouldn’t care either way, what I like most about it is they are not making people feel like they have to do 25 anymore.

If they make it to where you can do the 10 or 25 bosses depending on what you have on an encounter basis, that will be even nicer for certain guilds.  I’ve recently been able to participate in some guild 10 mans and had a lot of fun.  Yesterday I joined in the end of a 25, and well didn’t.    I applaud Blizzards decision to go in this direction and look forward to these changes in Cataclysm!

I just wanted to take a second to weigh in on the recent talk over the new items added to the Blizzard store.  It seems that some people have got increasingly negative towards Blizzard over the sale of this mount and I’m not sure why.  Blizzard had up to this point been selling non-combat pets without too much fuss.  In fact I bought Lil’KT and the Panderan Monk back when they first came out. Blizzard donated half the proceeds on the monk for a time to charity which amounted to over $1.1 Million.

Later they added in the two new plush toys which game with in-game versions.  I guess not much complaint over this because you got something physical for it in addition to the in game pet.  I want to get these for the in game pets, but I haven’t yet.  Part of my enjoyment in the game is collecting the non-combat pets.  I do have a limit though on what I’d pay, I think Blizzard found it.  For instance, though I would love to have the TCG pets, I have never bought any of the cards because they range from $75-300 and that is just silly for something that isn’t real.

Blizzard has said from the very beginning they will never sell anything that is for more than cosmetic purposes.  Though people are starting to wonder if the corporate heads are going to pressure someone into doing something different but that will never happen.  It doesn’t have too, and I think the horse could have even been a way to prove that.  Based on the queues that were seen and the demand, it looked as if Blizzard made $3 million or maybe more off the horse that first day.

Now to those that say Blizzard is greedy for selling these, this is a reminder for you.  You may not think about this often, but Blizzard is a business.  Businesses exists to make money, I’m not sure why it is so insulting or surprising that Blizzard exercises one of their ways to make money.  In fact you should be happy when Blizzard is successful.  The more successful they are the more quality content will come out of the company for us to enjoy.

Blizzard is being very careful about how it exercises this revenue stream if you notice.  They could just as well have their artists make 100s of pets and mounts and stick them up there.  I think the impact would be lost however and they would not be able to generate the kind of money they do from doing a more limited number of quality options.  So I don’t expect them to release a flood of items any time soon.  A new pet or mount here and there is probably all you will ever see, so stop your whining and don’t worry about it!

Took a quick break to check out MMO-champion to see what was up and saw Blizzard upgraded the Armory.  They added some neat features, including a 3D view of your character modeled with all your gear along with a RSS feed of your recent activity.  It shows stuff like Achievements, or Achievement Criteria, Boss Kills, and when you aquire an item.  This seemed like a pretty neat thing to put on the site so I added it under my armory profile.

It is nice to see Blizzard continuing to develop the armory and is surpassing anything any of the other MMOs were doing, and used to charge you for even!

It is probably asking for too much but it would be nice if it showed things like when you aquired a pet, or mounts since these are things people collect and are proud of as well.

First Impressions

I thought I’d write down what my first impressions are of the magazine now that I received it and had a chance to go through it.  The first thing I thought when I saw it was WoW this looks like Nintendo Power…  Now I know this is being produced by the same company, but they kept making a big deal about the quality and such that for some reason I expected a little more.  Not to say there is anything wrong with Nintendo Power, I subscribed to it for years and years in fact back in the day.

The biggest problem with the magazine of course though was that it was late, very late in fact.  This is the Winter 2009 edition, and you can tell by the way things are wrote in the articles that they were written a while ago.  If Blizzard is going to treat this like one of their game releases and the magazine is going to end up this late each time then they may have an problem.

The Art

The artwork in the magazine is excellent!  The cover which they gave us a preview of before Christmas in the form of a desktop background is awesome.  If they continue that level of artwork I hope they make it available as a background as well in the future!  Throughout the magazine you’ll find page after page of concept art, in game screenshots, and custom graphics.  I remember one of the selling points they were pushing that it would be like an art book and you can definitely see that. Some of my favorite was the Deathwing art on page 9 where they began the Cataclysm preview, and the Lich King on page 36 for the article on Icecrown Citadel.

The Content

The content in the magazine is there, and good but it isn’t exclusive enough I think to draw in subscribers yet.  Magazines have it hard I will admit, even harder than a Newspaper.  They take longer to produce and the information gets old.  The thing here though is they have direct access to Blizzard so I was expecting more first hand information.  So far my favorite parts of the articles have been the lore they put in.  Now I’m sure this information is written down somewhere else but it is nice how it is integrated into the information being dispensed.

My biggest complaint about this issue in particular was the lack of any new information about Cataclysm in the magazine.  They had a nice article, but it little to no new information.  They had some charts describing leveling flows for the revamped old continents I don’t remember seeing before anyways. I was hoping for more information, any thing really, but maybe there isn’t anything new to give or Blizzard is being hush hush about it all still   That said the article is very well written and a good review of all the goodies we are going to be getting in the expansion.

The other thing I found interesting and this may be because of the delayed release but there was a nice article about ICC, but mostly about the lore and what was in ICC. Not any detailed raid info or the like but they did have a detailed article about the ToC Raid.  Again the magazine was suppose to come out before 3.3 was put live which is why it ended up that way.  It is too bad they couldn’t have got in like a profile of even the first boss in there or something.  I haven’t read the entire ToC article yet but it looks good, and I look forward to reading one on ICC

Conclusion

This is the first issue so you can cut them a lot of slack I think.  They are only doing quarterly issues so I hope they can get them out on time from now on.  Overall I am pleased with the magazine.  I can complain about it being late, or not having the information I wanted to be in it, but Blizzard is involved in it so I should and will probably have to expect both of those   The artwork is awesome to see.  They have access to Blizzard so interviews with the devs and executives is going to be great.  There is something for everyone in this magazine.  They have quite a bit of PvP content, most of which I hadn’t read yet, about Arenas, and Battlegrounds and the like.  They have the stories and lore we all enjoy.  They even had a section over Blizzards card game version of WoW.  I liked the sections on Healing, Tanking and DPS as well.  It also seemed like they had player interviews and opinions throughout the magazine again which was a plus to me.  Finally they had fun things like the article on warcraftpets.com and cooldown which had some amusing abilities/items you’ll never see

I look forward to first quarter 2010 issue which I hope to be full of great ICC and new Cataclysm information, as well as actually arriving in first quarter

Here is another blast from the past!

My first Nef kill when I was with FEST on Jan 26, 2006.

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY WoWPriests.info!

This is the 4th Anniversary of the site.  I believe this is the longest I’ve ever run a web project and stuck with it   We have had quite a few transitions in the last 4 years.  Technically the Anniversary was November 1st, but with all the extra hours at work I’ve been doing I missed it and decided to celebrate on December 1st

I purchased this domain in September 2004 and put up a Priest fan site.  This was after I bought my way into the fileplanet sponsored stress test of WoW.  I got to be involved in both Stress Test 1 and 2, plus Open Beta.  Originally when I started getting interested in WoW I was dead set on playing a Druid.  So when I got in the stress test I didn’t want to spoil anything so I decided to choose the one class I would probably never play, the Priest.  Even though I always played a Cleric in MUDS, all the MMO’s Priest/Cleric classes were always terrible.  It turns out though I fell in love with the Priest and I started a fan site for it.  The site just never took off though and I decided to take a different approach.

So on November 1st 2005 I started a blog called Adventures of a Dwarf Priest.  At the time Dwarves were sought after because of fear ward and such.  The blog was originally run on google’s blogger site.  Eventually I transitioned it to my own hosting and began using wordpress.  The site has undergone several faces in that time period and I am quite happy with the evolution of the site now.

I’ve had a lot of ideas I have wanted to do and not had the time to complete.  I am hoping that some of things I have planned I will be able to get done this coming year.  I am also pretty excited about the new expansion and changes to the world.  There will be all new set of exciting adventures.  My recent entry into Texas Mercenaries brings forth a new set of raiding adventures, and we have the climax to the Lich King saga coming up here soon!  I’ve also picked up Shadow again and there will be many more adventures in my attempts to become a useful and proficient DPS to go along with my amazing Disc healing abilities

Thanks to everyone who reads and enjoys the site!  This has continued to be a very interesting experience for me.

Was going to post some links to some interesting moments in the past over the next few days.  I’d like to start out with the second entry posted to this blog.  This was back on Deathwing after my original guild Witch Hunters dissolved and I was looking for a new guild.   I applied a guild called FEST that turned out to lead to many many interesting adventures   Check out this post.  It gives you an idea of what my UI used to look like, and the old site

Happy Thanks Giving to Everyone!  I hope the Turkey is roasting and everyone has a pleasant day.

I’m pretty excited I ordered my new gaming system this morning.  It is my Christmas Present to myself / Reward for working so hard / Not going to buy a new Mac computer.  I decided since my Mac, now going on 4 years old is still fine for everything I do that upgrading it seemed like an incorrect use of funds.  Even selling the old one would put me out over $2k or more for a current Mac Pro.  Not to mention Mac’s have never been optimized for Games, and the Mac version of WoW has always lagged a bit behind the PC version.  I decided to order a gaming system, and just get a KVM to switch between them.   I’m pretty excited about this because by nature I’m an old Gamer, and an old hardware freak.  I used to upgrade my computer every 3 months before I met my wife

I speced out a machine from a very cool company called iBuyPower.com.  They let you build totally custom PC’s and don’t charge you an arm and a leg for them.  I’ve played with people before who use their machines, and newegg, another company well respected by me sells their machines as well.  So after much thought and research over the past month or so I decided on the following.

I decided to go with the 920 CPU because of the price point.  To go up one processor was more than $260 which just didn’t seem worth it to me.  Instead I opted to get the right MB, CPU fan, and system cooling to do a little over clocking   I haven’t done that in a long time either!  I was reading though and it appears that getting 3.8Ghz out of the 920 is pretty normal.  I decided to go with the ATI HD 5870 graphics card because of the price and speed of the single card.  The highest end GeForce card was still beating it slightly, but it was $200+ more.  The ATI card is also a little more future proof with DX11 support already.

I’m sure this system will run WoW quite well, and am looking forward to a few other upcoming Blizzard games   A non Blizzard game I’m particularly interested in getting as well is Dragon Age: Origins.  I’ve read a lot of good reviews of it and have enjoyed BioWare RPG games in the past.  Hopefully the system isn’t delayed too badly by the HD 5870 shortages I keep reading about.  I decided I better order it and “get in line” so to speak