Adventures of a Dwarf Priest

Well I got my site fixed up again.  WordPress was in bad need of updating, which I also needed to update the theme, which then required my customizations to be reapplied.  Then I had to go find a fix for the flickr plugin I use because the author is MIA.  The armory widget I use was misbehaving but now it seems to be good.

WOOT!

Time to go do the fishing daily and then pass out LOL

Finally had a chance to do a full site backup and upgrade to WP2.8.  I think I’ve tested everything, but please let me know if you find any issues!

I have been a multitasker since well I can remember. When it comes to computers it was one of the reason I was a devoted Amiga fan for soooo long.  At work I sometimes multitask almost to a fault, in other words I do so many things at once it can take a while for any one thing to be finished hehe

Today however I have been a pro.  I had to come into work today to do some out of peak hours updates and such. In the middle of things I’ve managed to do some touching up of the site!  I have worked on a few neat ideas too for some content related things.  The first of which is to really get with finishing the UI section of my site

Some things worked on today:

• Page Clean-ups
• Moved email subscription out of a page and into a widget at the bottom of the site
• Did some widget rearranging and added the flickr widget
• Got a pro account for the flickr account I’m using to host the site images now
• Did some plugin updates and clean-ups
• Worked a bit on the UI section
• Added post/page/comment ratings
• Updated feedburner options

I finally found a plugin that does that gives you the quick links to share a post on another networking site!  I see people using them in wordpress all the time but I couldn’t find the plugin.  I was looking for the one I see most people with that says “Share and Enjoy” with some social networking links, but “Share This” ended up being even cooler I thought anyways.  You get a web2.0′ish window that gives you access to seemly every type of site you could want to post to

I also got an integration tool for twitter that is suppose to alert my twitter when I post.  Not sure how this looks though.  This post will be the first test of it.

Also on another exciting twitter note I have my first follower, which means someone has actually looked at my tweets!

Yesterday I had fun tearing my computer apart trying to figure out what happened.    I was loading up WoW when suddenly my screen went Blank.  So I hard reset my machine and when it booted at the main Apple load screen (yes I use a mac) it had orange stripes through it, and by the time the OS loaded everything was orange.  Luckily I dug around and I still had the old ATI X1900 card my machine came with.

So this morning I’ve been going round and round with Apple support to get warranty support on it.  The card isn’t quite a year old and should still be covered.  Apple says they don’t support it to go to the manufacture.  No one unfortunately can seem to tell me who that is.  Nvidia’s website directs you to the people who make the cards, they don’t make them.  This chip set has a known issue which is probably why it failed, it has lasted longer than most of them do though.  I had to ask for a senior engineer after the first apple support person was trying to hang up on me.  Thankfully he is suppose to be finding this out for me and getting back to me.  To see how one could go crazy check this out.

• Me: Where do I get support for the product you sold me.
• Apple: We don’t support it.
• Me: Yes I realize that so who does.
• Apple: Well the manufacture does.
• Me: Ok then who is the manufacture
• Apple: Let me look at the apple store.
• Me: It doesn’t say anything, just that its supported by the manufacture.
• Apple: Did you check the box?
• Me: I don’t have the box anymore, it’s almost a year old.
• Apple: Does it say anything on the card?
• Me: No it just says Nvidia
• Apple: this is only an issue because you don’t have the box anymore
• Me: I would have thought you could tell me where to get support from the product you sold me
• Apple: We are apple support we don’t know these things that would be sales.  I will look up the information and get back to you…

Now I am very appreciative of the guy trying to find the info but he basically did not think they should know it, which seems completely silly to me.  If your line is going to be it is supported by the manufacture, then you better damn well know who the manufacture is!  I’ll keep you posted!

Anyways on a lighter note, I got some nice feedback from a fellow WoW blogger that made me realize I should put links to other WoW blogs on my site.  So if you have a WoW blog email me or post a comment so I can add a link here!

Logged on for a short time tonight, my son was trying to avoid bed again.  I had a nasty headache but felt like letting off some steam.  I ended up joining a OS 25 man group which usually doesn’t take too long and isn’t stressful.  The guy actually only got 3 healers so I actually had something to do.  There are still a few things from this guy I wouldn’t mind, mainly a nice cloak, and possibly some wrists, though not ideal.  The valor tokens are also quite nice

Everything went down without a hitch.  I at first thought 3 healers wasn’t enough but it was just because on the first drake everyone kept standing in void zones

You also might noticed a new feature to the site.  I’ve got a twitter account especially for my WoW persona and will allow my WoW related thoughts to ooze out onto it, in addition to some more real-time blabberings.  This is partially an experiment with Twitter, and another way to feed content into the site. We’ll see how it goes.  Perhaps some people will prefer the twittering over my much more longer winded neanderings

Things are shaping up nicely I think.  I spent some time working on carpal tunnel…err moving sections into tags for instance tagging over 500 posts with the server names instead of having sections for it.  This was in the interest of better organization of meta data.  When I first started the tag thing wasn’t really around and then I didn’t really get into it till I started using flickr.

So I’ve managed to condense the sections, the old stuff won’t be perfect of course.  Transfered for the most part the old sections into tags where appropriate.  I even created a new editorial section to seperate out my opinons because I know all of you want to read that!

I found the nifty Armory plug-in you’ll notice to the right that gives you a good overview of me.  You can see how I’m taking my sweet time on my professions (I always have).

My last step I think is I’m going to move my image management onto flickr, so I don’t have to mess so much with the images.  I’ll just upload screenshots off to a flickr I created just for this purpose and then I got a plug-in to link them from there.

I started on the new look and feel today.  Hopefully those that still happen by like it!  This is still a work in progress and I haven’t got everything to my liking yet.  Excpect to see some more changes in the future.

There was a huge queue again today on Doomhammer, I went ahead and logged in ahead of time and managed to get in almost when I wanted to.  I saw a group looking for a healer that was doing a heroic Azjol which was yesterdays daily that I still had.  So I joined up with them and almost regretted it.  The leader of the group was a enhancement shaman and I have still yet to see one do good dps.

We had a warrior tank which are not so common anymore.  Of course with my luck we wipe on the first boss about 4 or 5 times I don’t remember how many, too many.  I keep getting agro, and sure enough everyone blames me…  This happened to me the last time when I was with this pally tank that couldn’t hold agro.  He admitted he kept forgetting to do consecrate but hey it was my fault.  In this case the warrior kept seeming only hold agro on skull while the others kept running around attacking me or the DPS.  I am a healer, and I have silent resolve (30% less agro) if I get agro either someone isn’t doing their job, or everyone is dead.  I was just about to give up on them when we make it past and blow through the rest of the instance.  On the last boss I got too many adds and too much poison on me in the last phase and died but the enhancement shaman stayed alive long enough to keep the tank up long enough to finish the 12k left on the boss.

After finishing the daily I left that group and saw someone shouting they only needed a healer for Heroic Violet Hold.  I figured what the hell I had time for that it is short and joined that group.  We made short work of the instance, it was kind of a weird group but it worked out.  We had a Warrior Tank, Feral DPS druid, Enhancement Shaman, and Ret Pally.   There was one death, the tank died in the last few seconds of that ethereal guy, he summoned everyone and two of the balls exploded on him and killed him before I could even react.  The boss died in nearly the same instant.  It was weird the bosses little summoning spirals got bugged and stayed around after he died.

Nothing good dropped for me in either instance, some healing boots dropped that were fairly nice but I didn’t want to give up crit.

Oh and so you can see, this is what I look like now.  I took over my original name Laneer on this server, it was annoying the way I had to do it taking 90 days to get my name back after renaming my mage I had on this server.

My mage on this server has become my new main alt.  I retired Fesster (now called Fesstir) to a bank alt.  I enjoy the Mage much more.  In fact I’ve taken up the new Arcane talent spec and it is pretty fun.  You get to be a little machine gun and have some neat things like instant invis!  So I have been playing him a lot too, he is 72 almost 73 now.  I had him abandon alchemy since Inien is an alchemist on this server anyways.  So he is now an inscriptionist.  I just got him to 400 today and he now has a nifty shoulder enchant.  I wanted to do this so I had easy access to vellums which people seem to think they need to charge an arm and a leg for.

As far as site news I’ll probably be looking to update the look of the site, and restructure the category system as it is a bit dated now.

I thought I’d start off with my first rant of the year.  Everyone has a different idea in there head when they think of dual specs.  When Blizzard first threw around the idea it had little to no description. My immediate thought was oh finally they are going to have a PvP spec for when your in the arena/BG and then you can have your regular one every other time.  I thought wow, what a great idea that will be really neat and make PvP more fun.

Then I’m sitting in Blizzcon when they put more form to the idea.  They are talking about having a button you push that switches between 1 of 2 preconfigured specs, including a second set of glyphs.  I immediately turned to Inian and said what a horrible idea!  Now we still don’t have all the details for this and how it is going to work.  They did say they are not going to force you to go back to town, and the intention was to not have pally’s switching between holy and prot between boss fights though they didn’t specifically say they were going to prevent that.

One thing everyone assumes is that it isn’t going to cost gold.  That all the people that whine they have to respec for arena’s then back again for raiding spend all this gold.  If it isn’t going to have cool downs or restrictions on when/where you can do it then it is going to have to cost gold.  I for one hope that it costs the same as it does now, 50g.  The reason of course is because I think it is a horrible idea and want to discourage people from using it.

I’m sure you thinking what could be so horrible about having two specs you can change on the fly?    Well I’m thinking mostly from a hybrid perspective here, but it is going to be bad.  I PUG a lot, and always have as you may have read here.  I run into a lot of unskilled players in this process.  I really fear the day when you start getting holy paladins joining a group as the tank, enhancement shamans becoming healers, and holy priests going shadow.  Some people in this gave have a hard enough time being vaguely skilled at one spec and job, give them the ability to take up another and now they are even less skilled.

The other reason it bothers me so much is it waters down the only individuality in WoW.  My one and only complaint about WoW is there is very little you can do to be different from another person.  I am a Disc Priest, that Dwarf Priest over there wearing nearly identical gear, has my face, done nearly the same achievements and farmed the same rep is a Shadow Priest or is he?  Now taht guy presses a button and he is a Disc Priest too.  Now I could say I’ve been healing for 4 years, and am quite a skilled and experience Priest.  The guy who pushes a button and becomes me will more than likely not even be close, but no one will be able to tell that.

The Mages are in full whine mode about this change as well.   Another counter argument to the idea is that the pure DPS will have no place in a raid anymore.  So that’s rogues, hunters, mages and warlocks.  All they can do is DPS, they have no other job.  They claim how can they compete with a raid slot when you can take a Ret/Holy Paladin, or a Boomkin/Feral Druid, or a Shadow/Holy Priest.  If they implemented the dual spec like they have mentioned, this is one mage whine that could come true in some hardcore guilds I suppose.

In closing I think WoW needs more individuality not less.  Yes I’m sure there will be a group of people that go all out, have the proper sets of gear and capacity to be skilled at both.  For the most part though, I believe this system will hurt WoW.  My only hope is that Blizzard will not go through with it as originally discussed.  I have faith in both Blizzard coming to their senses, and Mage whinning