Do you know a Dum-Dum?

WoW is a social game. All MMOs are made that way. You can get to the end game without interacting with people if you like, but they are regardless. In your travels, you will most likely meet many new people and even make a few friends. A few of these friends may be dum-dums.

These are the people that you play with whose company you enjoy.....but they are generally terrible at the game. They are usually called noobs. Since they are a friend, they are dum-dums instead. We have all seen them......they will make you facepalm in oh so many ways. These dum-dums are usually teachable. Since they are your dum-dum, feel free to do the teaching.

You may be wondering...."Darraxus, how do I know if my friend is a dum-dum?" Well I am glad you asked!! If you don't know if your friend is a dum-dum, you may in fact be a dum-dum yourself. In case you are the dum-dum (which we know you arent because you are smart enough to be reading my blog duh), I will list a few sure ways to spot if your friend (or you) are dum-dums.

1) They gear like a dum-dum: Your Deathtard friend gets to level 80. You inspect him and see defense gear mixed with spellpower gear and a few pieces of leather or mail. You may even find them wearing a piece of cloth gear. This is a sure fire sign of a dum-dum. If they have been wearing the same boots since level 19, they may be a dum-dum. If they only choose items that match regardless of stats, they may be a dum-dum....unless its an RP server, then they can have both.

2) They spec like a dum-dum: All of their talent points in one tree? Check! This is one mistake that a lot of dum-dums seem to make. They dont fully research their class and hear that "x-spec" is the best for their class. They then dump every point into that tree. These are usually the ones that you find in a oug that are doing 900 dps at level 80. They try.....but they are dum-dums.

3) They use rotations like a dum-dum: A rotation is the proper order that you should be using abilities to maximize your DPS or threat. Healers are different in that they need to be reactive. If their rotation includes throwing in abilities they should not be using or their rotations are too loose, they may be a dum-dum. Make sure they are using the max rank of their spell too. True story about a friend who may have been a dum-dum and has since improved.

He was a hunter. He was beastmaster until well after he hit 80. He was doing 800 dps. We changed his spec. He started doing 1000 dps. We told him to make sure to send in his pet immediately. He started doing 1200 dps. We told him to tighten up his rotation and had him set up his buttons in order of priority. He did 1800 dps. Then he figured out he was using rank one of explosive shot and black arrow! DPS went up to about 2500 in 5-10 mans and 3500 in 25s. Dum-dums can get better. They just need to be pointed in the right direction.

4) They make gold like dum-dum: They do not know how to use their professions to make money. They barely know how to use their profession to their own advantage. Instead of using the auction house smartly, they vendor everything they get. They don't know the value of anything. They sell too low and pay too high for items. Especially items they dont really need.

If your friend appears to be a dum-dum. Give them help immediately. They will thank you for it. If you appear to be a dum-dum....well.....do some research and quit being so lazy...dum-dum.

Things that make you "LOL" or smile

One of the great things about WoW is that they throw in those little things that make you laugh and smile. There are tons of things in game that have given me these reactions. Here are a few examples.

Druid Forms: Not so much the feral forms, but the Boomkin and Tree make me laugh. How can you not enjoy a giant lazer shooting owl with a fat ass that dances like Chris Farley? The tree is another of my favorites because they are so damn ugly. Not to mention their /cower animation is gold. The thing that I find silliest about them is their tree form casting animation. Especially the instant cast spells. Sometimes it looks like you are the only one in the crowd doing the wave.

Extreme Mouse Spinning: Obviously mouse turning is a good thing. What is extreme mouse turning? Making yourself spin in ridiculous circles. This one is mostly for my wife. She will literally laugh out loud every time I do it. It looks especially ridiculous on the Ram mount.

Training Mobs: Not training as in teaching and not mobs as in Moffia, but the act of pulling a ton a mobs at the same time...and running like hell. I used to do this so that my wife would not get knocked off her mount. This was yet another thing that gave her some good giggles. There can be some very comedic results when a Hunter tab targets Midknight in Karazhaz through the wall and sends his pet in. Now that is a train.

Pop Culture References: There are pop culture references everywhere in the game. Starwars, Startrek, Starship Troopers.....OK, so there are a lot of Star movies. One of my favorites are the Arathi Battle Master in Shattrath. The one who looks like He-Man and is named Adam Eternium. He even has his Battle Tiger along for the ride.

Eating Shitty Food: Literally. You eat nuts. Quest giver gets mad. Makes you shit out nuts....next person comes along and eats nuts. MMMMMMMM. Another one that made me laugh was the quest where you bring the rotten eggs back to Tobias the Filthgorger. He throw up and causes everyone else in the area to hurl uncontrollably. Definately one of my favorite quests for laugh factors.

To me, this is one of the things that seperates WoW from the competition. They are kind of like the Family Guy of MMOs. Tons of obscure references and shenanigans fitting together into a nice package.

Weekend Update

This weekend was super bust IRL so I only got a bit of playing in over the weekend. Unfortunately, I have not been able to run a raid or anything of the such for a few weeks now. I am still dying to get into an Onyxia run. Anyways, here is breakdown of some of the weekends activities.

Leveling: There was a little bit of leveling over the weekend on my part. I got a few bubbles of XP for my Warlock. The AV nerf has really hurt the XP. I am getting about 5k less XP per objective now which really adds up. And I am getting a ton less honor. It may be time to venture back into the world of questing. So far the other BGs still seem to be sucktastic for XP. I also dusted off my level 69 Hunter to do a few quests with a friend who recently reactivated his account. He quit just after the scourge invasion during BC and picked up Wrath just a few weeks ago. We smashed a few of the Kaluak quests before I had to head to bed.

Brewfest: I am still grinding out Brewfest tokens so that I can get the title. I am not doing it to get the Violet Protodrake. I left too many unfinished Hollidays for that. I am doing it because a Dwarf with the Brewmaster title if full of win. It is unfortunately a pretty slow grind. I have saved all of the tokens so far so that I can pick up the clothes for that achivement, do the dalaran achivement, go back to the Brewfest grounds and trade the clothes back in for the tokens. Then I plan on getting the Brew of the Month thing and the pink ellek. I have not been motivated to do Direbrew as all.

Auction House: This is probably where I spent the majority of my available time over the weekend. The Glyph Market is still down, but it also seems like some of my main competitors may be slowing down. The big sellers over the weekend were Snowfall Ink, Iron-Bound Tomes, and Runescrolls of Stamina. Snowfall Ink is only going got 10 gold a piece but they are coming out my ears. I have been selling 1-2 Iron Bound Tomes a day for 450 gold each. That is a nice profit considering the mats used. The last is the new group stamina scroll. To make a stack of 5, it takes 10 resilient parchment and 1 snowfall ink (I believe that is correct). Inks are going for 10 gold and resilient parchment are 40 silver each. So for around 14 gold, I make 5 Runescrolls which I then sell for 11-14 gold PER SCROLL. I have sold a bunch of them.

Other than that, I was busy moving and getting things set up at a new place. How was your weekend?

Friday Linkage

Yeah Im being lazy today. Big whoop wanna fight about it? Figured I would link some of the blogs I read incase you never actually visit the blogroll on the right side of my blog.

Arioch at Clearcasting is comparing haste to swedish fish. At least she didnt compare it to candy corn....the red headed step child of candy.

Tarsus the Stupid Tank (Scarlet Crusade Represent!!!) wrote about the tanking goodies that Onyxia drops for those of you too lazy to go to WoWHead or dowload Atlas Loot!

The Ancient Gaming Noob recounted his experiences as a pirate at brewfest......pirates....with beer. WHO WOULDA THUNK IT!!!!!

Aggro Junkie is being even lazier than I am!!!!

Doctor Moocow over at WTFspagetti is looking for a new home. Holla back at him.

That will conclude my laziness for today. I am far to busy being delicious!

MMOs...the way we look

Humans in MMOs have often been somewhat odd. The men have too many muscles and the women have too many boobs (thats a problem??!!?? Buh duh duh). Some people want to play with these kinds of characters. Others probably dont. Birdfall has been talking a lot about customization lately and for me thinking. We need more customization in MMOS.

This is specifically for our characters. We shouldnt have to have a musclebound mage or priest.....especially when they have 40 strength. You should be able to create a skinny mage if you want....or a fat priest. Sure there are the other races that are already ugly, but you should be able to make your human avatar as ugly as you are :)

For a warrior toon, I would probably ideally make a male character that would be ugly as sin. Tatoos across his body, a perpetually broken nose, scar running down his face. Perhaps an eye missing. They are warriors and have been in many many battles. They should be ugly. I would also make mine with a beer gut. He would fight hard and drink harder. These little customizations are what make a character that much more fleshed out. In WoW, you can basically choose skin color and hair style. Gear will make you look a bit different, but many end-game characters are identical because they want the same gear.

The second part of customization should be your gear. You should be able to change the color, add spikes, effects, etc. It would be awesome to make your own gear that looks like your own gear. You may want to wear a pink leather gimp suit. You may want to wear a suit of spike clad plate mail. You should have the choice.

Warhammer had some of the things I wanted as far as customization....just not enough. And the gameplay sucked. If we could get a character creator that would let us drag things to places we wanted and expand them or shrink them. You could have a three inch scar on your face...or a 3 foot scar down your leg.

I love WoW as a game. Unfortunately the customization is really at the bottom of the MMO heap. Maybe it will change a bit more with future expansions. They already added the barber shop and perhaps a dance studio in the future. Maybe we will be getting more customization as well....and will be able to make ourselves ugly without stooping to the Hulk Hogan hair cut.

If WoW were Real Life

Shit would be pretty interesting if WoW were the same as real life. Some random thoughts for this Wednesday morning.

1)You could summon your car. You would have no need for a garage or parking spaces. You could just go stand in the street and summon your Toyota. You would also be able to make your car jump and spin ridiculously.

2) You would not need to eat or drink. Unless of course you wanted the plus career skills and sex appeal buff from your Grandma's chicken dumplings. You would only really need to eat after you got the crap beat out of you for tracking mud on the carpet.

3) If you died, no biggy. Just run back to your body and live again. If there is no body just run back to the place where you died and you will get a new body (equally sexy as the last one).

4) You would all be buffed and/or have a huge rack. There would be no more fatties or ugly people. We would all be really really ridiculously good looking...like Zoolander....or like Jong before he went Alliance.

5) There would be no more real jobs. You either ground meter maids and IRS employess for cash or you sold stuff on the stock market. People would stand around with a hat with an exclamation point on it if they needed something done. These people never move or change at all.....and they have the same task for everyone. Somehow they do not end up with a giant stinking barrel of East LA Crypt eyeballs sitting behind them.

6) Everyone would be homeless. And you would disappear from view when you fell asleep. When you "woke up", you would be well rested and get twice as much satisfaction from running over your third grade teacher with a Zamboni.

7) Nobody would need to go to the bathroom. Unless you ate the peanuts at the tavern....you werent supposed to eat those and must now crap them up for the next person to eat.

8) Everything would be settled with a duel. You have an arguement? Challenge them to a duel. Whoever wins is right. Since everyone is buff and equal, these would be relatively even....except the people who keyboard turn....they lose.

9) It would be funny when your friend died in some ridiculous way. Since people dont actually die, that tragic fishing accident where your friend got impaled on a whale penis is actually hilarious. Bonus laughter points if you are the one that causes them to die....such as unsummoning your Toyota when you drive off the grand canyon.

10) You could only do one dance per race. Mexicans get a salsa dance. African Americans get the MC Hammer dance. Anglo Americans do the waltz. Asians do the robot. All of them. DOMO ORIGATO MR ROBOTO.

Anyone have any additional things to add to the list of our make believe world where we get to be much bigger bamfs than IRL?

Fun with Direbrew

Last night was perhaps the first time I had a group of people I know in RL do something as a 5 man. It was my wife, Occeleta, Grimir (Hunter), Marlyna (Mage and actually a guy IRL), and myself.

I grabbed my Warrior first and headed over to the instance. When I got there, something incredibly strange and annoying happened. I couldnt go into the instance for some reason while everyone else could. I tried running in and out several times and never got into the actual instance. I did however get stuck in some weird ghost instance that was actually outside the instance. I could not see anybody outside and I was stuck in one spot. I could chat with people, but not move. To top it off, I could not Hearth and the auto-unstuck feature would not work either. It would disconnect me from the server every time I tried to use it.

So, I put in a GM ticket and logged onto my Paladin. To my surprise, Darraxus was still online! Not only that, but I he was taking up a spot in the group despite not actually being in the group. After at least 15 minutes of trying to fix it, I was finally able to be invited back to the group.

It was decided that I would be the tank.....as a ret pally. The healer was....NOBODY!!!! We had a ret pally, Rogue, Boomkin, Hunter, and Mage to start. First try, I had to bubble to survive and ended up dying anyways. I think one other person may have died. They managed to burn him down while he was trying to smash all of the other DPS....I watched from the comfortable position of face on stone.

Second time.......second verse same as the first. We burned him down with just the Hunter still standing. Oh was it ugly. He three shotted me before I could even bubble or heal myself.

Third time was a little better as I decided I would heal myself during the fight. I survived for the first time......I think we may have all survived on this try!

4th time I got rofl pwned again when he was starting to get low on HP. He then went and squished out Hunter before being taken down to China Town.

The last time I had my wife heal and nobody died. I could have saved 30 gold in repair bills had I thought of this earlier...../facepalm.

We then did a few switcharoos. My Warrior was still somehow going on and offline and still stuck in place so I grabbed my Druid. Occeleta grabbed his hunter and Marlyna grabbed his priest. No instead of having no tanks or healers, we had no tanks and two healers. While waiting for the rest of us to show up at the instance, my wife pulled out her Elwynn Lamb.....who was promptly killed by an Elwynn Wolf that came out of nowhere. Grimir originally thought that it was his pet Wolf. They tried to get it to happen again with no luck.

The rest of the instance went very easy (or at least easier with the two healers). With no tank, the mobs pretty much ran amok. They were all over the place. The adds would latch themselves to the healers pretty good. Thankfully they did not really hit that hard. I actually had to heal more than I would in a Heroic Dungeon lol.

It was a lot of fun getting all of us together for the first time. My wife got two new trinkets (spell power and crit trinkets) which replaced the mid 70s green and Wrathgate trinket she was sporting previously. Marlyna upgraded a trinket as well. Occeleta was the lucky bastard of the night winning the roll on the only Kodo that dropped for us.

Eventually, I was able to get Darraxus back as a GM contacted me and transported him right outside of Ironforge. That was one of the stangest glitches I have ever found in game. It was like I was in an instance outside of an instance where nobody else was. And I couldnt do shit about it.

Anyways, if you are really bored, you too can do Direbrew shenanigans with no tanks or no healers.....or all tanks....or whatever whacky combos you can come up with.

Back Into the Swing of Things

I got in a bit of WoW time over the weekend, but it was pretty sporadic. Most of the time was spent getting the glyph industry back up to speed.

The shitty thing is that the glyph market is even worse than when I left. One of the old "goblins" who left is back and the market is super competitive. I am still bringing in around 1.5-2k, but I have to work harder for it. Most of the glyphs are selling in the 4 gold range now. Sometime I get lucky and post one that doesnt have any other up for a ridiculous price at it sells. I am currently sitting at 178k.

I have actually decided what to do once I hit the gold cap. I am going to send about 10k to about 5 of my toons and keep on trucking. This should give them the gold they need for anything that pops up. I have also considered giving out B-Day presents of 1000 gold to my friends.

Besides the glyph stuff, I started on some of the Brewfest crap on Darraxus. I got several of the achivements done, and this meta achivement should be relatively easy to get. It just takes time as you can only obtain so many of the brewfest tokens per day.

We blasted Direbrew 5 times with two tanks and 3 dps. I never even got below half health before he went down. I picked up one of the Stamina trinkets to replace my essence of gossamer. I do not know if it would be worth getting the other to replace the Black Heart. It would be a good chunk more stamina, but I also like the proc on the Black Heart. The other trinkets are very meh. The main reason I was there was for a stam trinket and a shot at the Kodo and Direbrew's remote control.

The main reason I want to complete the holliday meta achivement in the title. A beer swilling title for a beer swilling Dwarf seems all too appropriate. I think I am going to hold off on the pink elephant pet until I get the other stuff done since I already have the 75 pet achivement in the bag.

My wife has been playing a bit on her own doing her favorite in game activity. Picking flowers. She flys around Scholazar Basin picking flowers and then sells them to me. We both profit. She also gets to pick up a bunch of Frost Lotus to sell on the Auction House. We will probably do some of the brewfest stuff together this weeks so that she can get the pet at the very least.

The time away was wonderful, but it is good to be back. How was your weekend (and last week for that matter).

Honeymoon

Back from the Honeymoon where I had a wonderful time. 4 days at Disneyland and one night at a Bed and Breakfast in Cambria where we hung out on the beach for a bit and visited Hearst Castle.

Disneyland was a blast, but 4 days there will wear you out. I must have gone on Indiana Jones and Piarates at least 10 times each.....I went on Star Tours once because the son of a bitch makes me sick. I think it is the illusion of moving while not actually moving that gets me......plus my wifey dropped the camera in the ride and I was looking down to wrangle it up with my feet.

The first "ride" we went on when we entered the park was the Enchanted Tiki Room. The picture of bewilderment on my face says it all. WTF is that? My wife could not stop laughing for a good two minutes.

Space Mountain and the Haunted Mansion were closed......bah humbug.

While down there we also got the chance to visit Medievel Times. I would certainly recommend it for anyone. It is good food and an awesome show. We got the crappy red and yellow knight.....who lost first thing.

The wedding was absolutely beautiful. Neither one of us could have asked for anything more. It was perfect in our eyes. Well, that is it about non-WoW stuff. Next post I should be back into WoW mode.

Going to be AFK

I will be gone for a week or so. I will be getting married this weekend and on my honey moon all next week. I have not made any premade posts, but I may get a guess poster to put up something in the next week. I have not decided if I should bug another blogger or perhaps have someone that has not done the blogging thing post something.

Also, what would you like to see me write about more on the site?

Warrior tanking?
Druid Healing?
Pally DPS?
Random shit?
Gold making?
Other?

If anyone has any good ideas for articles, let me know.

Quirky Behavior

If nothing else, most people who have read his blog know that Tam is quirky. His most recent experience is about his love for the Wolvar pup and his subsequent adventures all around Northrend (including claims of his pups leet DPS).

Almost everybody I have met in WoW has had some kind of quirky behavior. Usually, it is something that will make you smile or raise and eyebrow. My fiancee for example is about as casual of a player as they get. However, she is more quirky than most. When she pulls out her Mechanopeep, she will also bring out the appropriate colored Mechanostrider so that they can spend time together.....mother and child. She only calls Mechanostriders by the name that she gave them....Ridiculouses.

Another little quirky thing is that she always rotates her Mechanostriders. She does this so that they never feel neglected by her using the same one over and over. If I do something for her on her character, she gets upset if I keep using the same one over and over again.

She also doesnt want ugly gear. Forget the stats. If it is ugly, she doesnt want it. That is why I had to buy her and Ebonweave Robe. It is styling and it also has helpful stats. This is the same reason she doesnt show her helmet (which even I admit is hideous).

She was also hell bent on completing the achivements to love all of the little critters on the world....of Warcraft. She succeeded.

I have had known many other players who are very quirky for other reasons. I have an aussie friend who was always broke....like really broke. Every bit of money he made went bye bye. It burned a hole in his wallet so to speak. He also had a bad habit of not looting his corpses....perhaps contributing to his perpetual brokeness. He hasnt been on for quite some time, but he got hacked a month or so back. We figured this out as the characters kept logging on and off constantly. Even characters he had no played for a year. We laughed at the hacker in whispers and guild chat.....why? He choose the wrong account to hack. Even if he sold everything on the characters he was looking at maybe 200 gold.

There is a fine line between quirky and annoying however. People who blurt out things annoyingly usually cross that line. People who spell all of their character names with special characters that most people dont know how to use are also more annoying than quirky.....HOW AM I GOING TO WHISPER YOU!!!!!

What kinds of quirky (or annoying) behaviors have you witnessed in you long (or short) time in WoW?

Weekend Update

I had a very busy weekend in WoW (as well as pretty busy schedule IRL). I got tons of crap done, so let me break it down for you.

Instances/Raids: First off, my fiancee did her first Heroic with me. It was good and it was bad. The bad was that she got incredibly stressed out with the jousting part (and wanted to stop playing right there). The good part is that she got another nice piece of gear and did a pretty decent job DPSing. She ended up doing 1800 dps for the run in a few epics and a bunch of crappy quest rewards. I only wish she had not gotten so stressed out.

I ran a ton of Heroics over the weekend with my Druid and got my t8.5 helm. I also ran a few raids. One was fail beyond fail, and the other was a ton of fun. The fail run was a Naxx 10 that I jumped into just for the hell of it. As soon as we hit the first boss, the failnessmonster reared its ugly head. We wiped on Anub. Yes, you read that correctly. We wiped on Anub. We had two healers (myself and a Shaman, two tank (DK and Warrior) and a bunch of DPS including Occeleta on his Hunter.

The first attempt went something like this. DK tank pulls......back to the entrance? WTF!!! While he is doing that, apparently he is not worrying about his threat rotation. Two seconds later there are two dead DPS. In middle of a Locust Swarm, the Shaman (supposed to be tank healing) DCed. Tank goes down, and we wipe.

We regroup. I say "Why did you pull him to the front door. Why didnt you tank him where he stands like everyone else?" Raid leader says something about having been there "a thousand times". To which I reply "WOW A THOUSAND!!! Didnt know we had the many resets!". Tank doesnt listen. Pulls like a retard. Two DPS die immediately. We get through the fight after about 10 minutes....seriously. One of the dead DPS leaves the raid group. Another follows. Then the Shaman accused me of heal sniping. Heal sniping....on a Druid....with two healers.....doing Anub....where both healers should be healing the tank. It was at this point that I decided to leave. Occeleta left as well. The retard DK tank was doing a massive 900 dps. At level 80 in epics.

On the other hand, I also had an awesome run with my Druid. I got into an Ulduar 10 run with a pug. I thought it may be shaky as we wiped on our first try of FL with 2 towers up. We downed him the second go round with very little difficulty. We then moved on and one shotted Razorscale. I got a new healing belt out of it. From there we moved on and one shotted XT as well with no issues. We two shotted Ignis and then moved on to Iron Council. We had 4 or 5 rought attempts before we decided to skip it and head over to Kologarn. Kolo was one shotted and I picked up a sweet ass healing trinket. We decided to call it there as several people had to go.

On my warrior basically did Heroic ToC and a Naxx 25. The pug Heroic ToC I did was fine. The guild one was complete fail. Mainly due to the resto shaman fucking around and trying to be funny. "Oh look, I totem pulled all of the mobs just before Paletress. Then we got DPS getting exploded by ghouls in the Black Knight phase 2. After about our 4th idiotic wipe, I left group. Fail in a PuG is one thing. People being idiots in guild is another.

The Naxx 25 on the other hand went really well. I went just for the fun of it....and for a chance at some DPS gear. We cleared 3 wings before I had to go with no problems. I got a DPS ring and my T7.5 DPS pants out of it. One interesting story: The new ability to trade items came in handy during this run. The crappy tanking trinket off of Maexxna dropped. Both of my trinkets are ilvl200. Those were the only slots I needed to get the "Epic" achievment. I asked to borrow the trinket, equipped it into both slots and BAM. I officially became epic. I then handed it off to a Paladin tank who was wearing mostly blues.

Leveling/PvP: I started leveling my Warlock again....through Alterac Valley. If your team doesnt suck, not only do you get tons of XP, but you also get a lot of honor. I started the evening 2 bars into 74 and ended it 1.5 bars from 75. I ended up getting a few achivements along the way as well as about 15k honor. The tradeoff is off is that you really dont make very much gold. And that it is hard to do a ton of damage against 80s. My Warlock is very well geared and has more health than some of the 80s that showed up, but hitting the bad guys was the hardest part. I took down a bunch of Horde including a few 80s solo. I think this is 100 percent how I am going to level my Warlock to 80. So far the other BGs suck for gaining experience and AV has pretty much become the 71-79 bracket with a few 80s sprinkled in.

One annoying thing I saw in a few games was 5 boxers. In one game, the Horde had a 5 box resto Druid and a 5 box Warlock. Getting 5 corruptions thrown on you at the exact same time kinda sucks.

Auction House: I made nice chunks of gold over the weekend but found that I was not really as into it as usualy. I really wanted to do more instances, and keeping up the glyph industry can be brutal at times. That said, I am at ober 167k and still creeping towards the gold cap. I decided to try selling a few of the epic tomes I can make, but have had zero luck so far.

Overall, it was a pretty good weekend. How was yours?

Sunday Funny

I never watched The Guild until Occeleta got me into it. Now I cant get enough of this video of pure win. Enjoy.

Baby Steps: First Heroic

I have been playing with my fiancee for a while now, but she is has not been completly comfortable with instancing. Even though she does fine, she still felt like people were thinking she sucked for no reason really. If she died in an instance for whatever reason, she would think that everyone else was mad at her despite them not saying anything.

So, tonight is going to be the first time she will set foot into a Heroic Instance. I bought her some decent gear to go along with the Argent Tournament Dagger we purchased for her with 25 seals.

To get her ready, it of course took a bit of a bribe. I will be giving her a vanity pet. To me, it is worth it. She was not comfortable with her DPS rotation, so I took her to the target dummies in Stormwind. I taught her how to use Starfire until eclipse procced and then switch to Wrath. I taught her where to look for the Eclipse proc that that she could switch back to Starfire after it ended. One of the other main things I showed her was that you can queue your spells in WoW. She would wait for the cast to completly end then press the button again about a half a second later. I had her press it before the end of the spell to tighten up the rotation a bit.

To make it even simpler, she just spams the button through the entire cast. She actually did very well, doing about 1600 dps on a level 80 test dummy. I also had her practice her AOE by Hurricaning three at once.

By the end of 20 or so minutes, she was much more comfortable. Now she can know that she will not be a noob when she sets foot into that first Heroic. She will do just fine.

I think part of her motivation is to replace the hideos chest piece I got her. She wants a pretty dress....and is wearing an ugly ass brown shirt with purple pants lol.

So, to get her to run instances...it took beautification and bribery of vanity (pet).

New VoA Boss....and MORE

Yesterday I got the chance to do Koralon, the new boss in VOA. I did the 10 man version with a pug. We two shotted it. I was one of the two Druid Healers.

The fight was not very difficult to be honest. As long as the two tanks stack and you have some good AOE healing you will be fine....and stay out of the fire. There is lots of fire. We two shotted the new boss in out first look at him.

The whole strategy is:

a) Stack Tanks. If you dont, metor fist will smash their faces in.
b) Dont stand in fire. Just like most other fights...stay out of bad stuff.
c) Heal your ass off (if you are a healer). You will have to do ALOT of healing if you are two man healing it. I did 3400 HPS for the fight and the other Druid did 3100 HPS for the fight.

Also, for those of you who didnt notice, there are now faction changes available for 30 bucks. All of the questions are answered on the official forums. Check it out.

Worst Players You Have Known

At some point you are going to play with some terrible players. Some of them are terrible because they just don't get it. Some are terrible because they are douchebags with an inflated sense of self worth. Over the course of playing, I have come across many many terrible players. Some of them get better at what they are "bad" at over time. Some never change. Here are some players that I have played with who were terribad. Their names will be changed to protect their identity :)

Ding: That is not actually his character's name, but it is what everyone calls him. Probably because he would come into vent and shout DIIIINNNNG. Every time he logged on. He also seemed to have tourettes as he would constantly be shouting "Shit" or "Piss". Oddly enought, this is not what made him "bad". It was purely how he played his Paladin. During the first part of BC, he was Ret. Ret was not particularly good, but he was especially bad. First thing was that he wore mostly tank gear while he was doing his ret thing. On top of the, HE DID NOT USE CRUSADER STRIKE!!!! One of a Paladin's main damage abilities and he did not use it. His damage was made up of 90 percent plain white melee. Needless to say he was doing less damage than the tank.

These days, Ding is actually pretty decent....on his Holy Priest. He still has his Paladin, but I very rarely see it these days...which is probably a good thing unless he actually figured things out.

Angst: This guy was a double threat when it came to bad. He had a mage with decent gear who was terrible. He also had a terrible prot warrior that he could not tank with to save his life. The mage was absolutely the worst. First, he was bad. Second, he would argue and bitch when anyone tried to help him out. I remember when one guy argued with him for 2 hours about how to play his mage. It was hilarious. I think they were both drunk.

You would think that with his low DPS, he was a frost mage....but he was a cookie cutter fire mage. I outdpsed him on my Prot Warrior in Regular Shadowlabs. This was when Prot Warriors had huge threat modifiers but couldnt do crap for DPS. He was well under 300 dps. His toon did more dps when it was mind controlled by Blackheart the Inciter. At least he could kill something then.

Angst ended up leaving guild eventually and starting his own guild....which was full of other terribads. It made me a sad panda when I saw that his Mage was eventually in full epics. At least he had not leached them (at least not all of them as he had done some raids with my guild). They were mostly crafted and PvP epics.

Douchemax: Douchemax was awesome DPS. He was an awesome PvPer. He was a lousy dickhead of a person. The guy basically just put down people constantly because there was no worry of him getting beat up in real life. He would tell you how shitty your dps was or how your gear sucked. The only people he was nice to were the girls in the guild. Yeah, one of those. He wanted to be alpha male, and since there was no way a 130 pound dork could do it in real life, he tried to do it in game. Annoyingly, he never got kicked for his bullshit behavior. He was kept around because of his DPS.

Douchemax is still a douche these days, but I dont have to deal with him at least. The last communication I had with him was when I sent him about 500 low level fish....individually. It had to have taken him a while to clear all that out.

Girl Category: I lumped this into one category because unfortunately, many of the girl players I have known were terrible in many different ways. Not to say that I did not know my share of good ones.

The first one is a player that I have played with since the days of Vanilla. She has a Hunter and a Priest at cap. He priest was her raid toon and was pretty darn good. Her Hunter was.....OMG. She was well known for her wipe causing accidents...such as.....backing into a group of Aboms at the event just before Rivendare in Strat Dead. Having her pet on aggressive and starting the magtheridon event before half of the raid had entered the room. Falling off of ledges and getting stuck were also common occurences.

There was another that was terribad as a Fury Warrior. She could not DPS her way out of a cardboard box. She then rolled a resto druid....and couldnt HEAL her way out of a cardboard box despite eventually being in mostly T5 gear. Why was she around? She was cybering with half of the men in the guild. And they didnt know about each other 0_0. She told them that she wanted to be with them etc. Well, it all blew up when the guys got to talking and finally figured it out. She then quit because her "husband" told her to. She did not have a husband. She also transfered servers and "gave her account to her cousin".

The last one I will talk about is a terribad that transfered from another server and joined my old guild to raid. She was awful. It did not matter if it was in Cat or Bear form. She ended up getting fully geared withing a few weeks then taking the epics and starting a crappy guild called (her name) and her Minions. How ridiculously retarded.

Anyways, who are some of the bads you have played with?

Beggars in WoW

If you have ever played WoW, you know that there are beggars. They send you whispers, yell near the bank, and generally just cause annoyance.

Begging comes in many forms, but the most common ones are money and boosting. "Can I haz a gold plx? :)" and "Can u run me threw SFK pls thx?" are probably familiar to anyone who has played this game for any amount of time.

There are usually two specific kinds of beggars.

1) The True Noob: This is the player who is actually new to the game. They have joined a game that has gone on for several years and perhaps they dont have any friends to help or give them advice. These players just don't know how to get what they need and may resort to begging. The saying "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will never be hungry again" comes to mind here. You can give them gold if you want, but I think it is better to teach them a way to make money. I could be telling them to pick up mining or herbalism. Both of those can make you a nice chunk of change while they are still making money and XP from quests.

Perhaps you tell them about Auctioneer. Some new players are not even aware of the auction house. Giving them a little bit of knowledge can go a long way towards not letting them slip into the second group of people which is......

2) Professional Con Artists: This is what they do for money. They beg on a low level alt and may even have a nice story as to why they need the gold. You are not helping anybody but them by giving them money. Helping the Noob will make the community a better place. Helping the Con Artist will make him think that begging is a good idea. He or she will continue to beg until it doesnt work anymore. They are usually the ones seen hanging out around the bank or auction house in each major city yelling for gold or a boost. Do yourself a favor and ignore them. If you offer to teach them, they may respond rudely.

I was sitting in the AH yesterday posting Glyphs and someone was begging for the strangest thing. They were asking for someone to buy them a Mechanopeep. A Mechanopeep is a pet from the Argent Tournament that sells for 800 gold or so these days. Beggars have balls, you have to give them that.

How do you deal with beggars? Do you tell them to eat a bowl of dicks or do you help them out?