autobottrixter

I'm resurrecting my Death Knight blog at chillofthegrave.blogspot.com and now I am very much in "HEY HEY EVERYONE LOOK PAY ATTENTION TO MEEEEEE" mode.

Poll #1656609 So where's everybody at?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 13

What blog/microblog/social media services do you use the most?

I know I'm not the only one getting tired of LiveJournal's increasing adwhoring and progressively worse site design.  For those of who still watch things here but have set up shop elsewhere, where are you doing your blogging nowadays?  I've set up shop on Tumblr, but I'd like to see where others are going as well.  Feel free to plug yourself in the comments, too.

This is once again cross-posted from trixter.tumblr.com.

After several days of sampling the new content and trying to play while feeling kind of shite, I finally got a chance to properly hunker down with Cataclysm this weekend.  I wasn't as enthusiastic about Cataclysm as I was about Wrath of the Lich King, but considering just how many of my happy buttons Wrath pushed with its concepts it's to be expected.  That doesn't stop it from being awesome.

My Death Knight Dariahn made it to level 84 and a half along with his paladin boyfriend Tendaros (aka my BFF Zack).  I learned a very important lesson about myself while leveling with him: The moment you put me in a group with another person, I immediately turn off my brain and start abusing /follow so I can browse Etsy for ferret sweaters/things with foxes on them/alter statuary/etc.  This is a habit I really need to break.  I developed some serious alt-tab ADD in between expansions and I need to stop and smell the Cinderbloom again.

We leveled the pair through Vash'jir from 80-82 and Uldum from 82-84, with a healthy smattering of instances throughout.  Vash'jir is absolutely breathtaking.  As the first all-underwater zone, it's a significant change from what I'm used to.  Questing there with a partner was a challenge since it isn't always clear from the dot on the map whether your buddy is above or below you, but being able to call into the next room helped.  The entire zone highlights how much denser the world has become.  Critters, targetable and otherwise, scuttle and swim wherever you look.  Massive ruins and coral formations are everywhere.  I found the area a little disorienting, with the extra dimension putting a wrench in my sense of direction, but I was starting to get the hang of it by the time we left.

The Egypt-inspired Uldum is the complete opposite of Vash'jir, giving Dariahn and Tendaros a chance to dry their armor out in the hot desert wind.  You're thrown into a conflict between cat-people, a faction of whom the Black Dragonflight is trying to recruit to their cause.  This zone also hosts an extended Indiana Jones homage with the return of Harrison Jones, this time trying to find the "Coffer of Promise" before a Hitler-esque goblin hands it over to Deathwing.  The desert nature of the zone makes it less visually stimulating than the colorful kelp forests of Vash'jir, but it's still impressive.

Five levels doesn't give Blizzard a lot of room to cram in new things, but the most striking thing we noticed was just how fast your HP stacks up once you start putting on quest gear and leveling.  Tendaros hit 100k in his tanking set at level 84.  Dariahn is just over 80k as DPS.  Tanking Stonecore at level 84 was significantly easier than tanking it at 82 (based on my scientific comparison of how much Zack cursed).  I haven't started leveling my 80 resto shaman, but I can only assume healing scales just as much.  DPS, on the other hand, barely seemed to scale at all.  I will admit that I've been putting off fussing over things like hit caps and ideal stat balance until 85, but I've only seen a tiny increase in DPS from 80 to 84, and judging by Recount in the instances I've run that seems to be common.  The tank may have more than doubled their HP, but DPS is rising at a much more modest curve.  There's also a greater need for crowd control, something Zack was more than happy to encourage.  It made me as a Death Knight feel kind of useless to see a hex target, a sheep target, a sap target...and Dariahn just stands there looking pretty.  Knowing that I'll actually get some use out of my random polymorph macro does move Meridith (my mage) up a little higher in my leveling priority, though.

Tonight we'll be hitting the Twilight Highlands, which Zack has assured me is "where it's at".  I'm sure I'll have plenty to say about that, as well as goblins and worgen, in the coming weeks.

Over on Tumblr I just posted a write-up of my first impressions of the Resto Shaman changes and a more whiny, QQ-filled one about the Frost Death Knight changes.

Originally posted by neo_prodigy at Spirit Day

(Cross-posted from Tumblr)

As I was saying the other day, I’m finally feeling a little inspired again, in a WoW-ward direction, but the character who’s sticking in my head is my necromancer-turned-lich-turned-shade, Dariahn’s “It’s Complicated”, Etheris. I’ve gone on at length in other venues about writing and RPing characters of dubious morality. It’s something I’ve had a lot of fun with since getting into WoW RP.

Etheris is a bit tricky, though. To start with, he’s currently a bitter, miserable Shadow of a man. Even when he’s gotten involved with other villainous characters he’s tended to pace about in mid-air scowling and refusing to talk in anything but Gutterspeak. It’s been a rare character indeed who’s earned his respect, and his disdain for those who haven’t, while fun to RP, makes it hard to get him motivated into RP situations. Once upon a time he had all kinds of charisma, but he’s not that person anymore.

And that’s the other problem I’ve had with him: The simple matter of getting my head around a character who has been through so many dramatic life - or unlife - changes. I have a pretty good handle on who he is now, but I often feel like there’s too much of a disconnect between Etheris the reluctant Forsaken and Etheris the young student in Dalaran falling in with the Cult of the Damned, or Etheris the power-drunk Scourge necromancer, or Etheris the finally-inhuman lich. The fact that each of these phases of his life was accompanied by a significant physical change makes it more difficult to visualize them all as the same man. In a way, maybe that’s good. Major life changes can make you feel like a different person, or more dramatically, can make you feel disconnected from who you were before. I already explored that a little with Dariahn. I’m just not super-comfortable with it.

There’s also the walking-a-tightrope issue of writing a gay villain, even if he’s a foil for a gay (anti)hero, but Peter David, one of my favorite comic writers, has already made some good points about that kind of thing. I’ll leave that be. But hey, inspiration is inspiration. I can only hope the rest of my life leaves me some time to take advantage of it.

(Cross-posted from trixter.tumblr.com)

I still have a lot of stuff going on in my life, and there's still some of it I'm not yet ready to blog about and some of it I will likely never blog about because I find blogging about such things to be awkward at best. On top of that, work has been stupid busy lately, so I haven't really had the mental wherewithal for it. But I should still post some things, right?

I have a roommate now. I was finally getting the hang of living alone, but my wee friend Zack was itching to move away from home and I had a spare room, so here he is. Thorium Brotherhood peeps know him as Tendaros. I tricked him into meowing on Vent and a healer friend of ours got him to go into my room and smack me upside the head for doing a horrible job minding my Chilled to the Bone stacks on Sindragosa. I made him watch bad Headmasters dubs and he made me drag out my old Armada tapes. There's been Drama as assorted parties have assumed dark, terrible things about the whole arrangement, but much of that is settling down. We're both shy introverts, so it's all working out pretty well.

This weekend we are going to go see Scott Pilgrim SO HARD.