I just read this on a blog:
I can't wait to stuff my RAM deep into your motherboard, baby.
Apparently, that is a joke. Really. Ram is apparently even a double entendre (as in the verb) -- though I'm guessing it's largely ironic as the whole thing is much more McLovin "I'm in" than "face down while I do my bizzle."
Now, I might be a douchebag, but that is unequivocally the gayest thing I've ever heard. And not like enjoying the company of penises gay, I'm talking gay gay. That kid who got picked last in kickball, and guess what, struck out and lost you the game gay.
I sometimes have moments where I, so desperate for attention, engage in similar degrading frivolity. I stop myself, but I sometimes type out the sentences. She seemed to enjoy the action of my main hand, but her stamina plummeted once the haste proc on my offhand kicked in. I delete the sentences quickly and punish myself. Typically, I'll watch 100 spins and whisper to myself while crying quietly, "why are you so gay."
The thing is, you know when a joke is bad or a blog entry is shitty. Why do you click "Publish" anyways? Desperation? Maybe, but I think the real reason is Ming. Ming creates blog envy. Blog envy is just like penis envy except it involves not so much of the women wanting to have penises and more of the "if he can talk about who the fuck knows constantly, why can't I." It's indirect jealously of the epeen.
I do miss the old school basketball references which have mostly fallen along the way. I remember trying to spoof World of Ming back in the day on the whole basketball issue but I got hung up on Marv Albert's constant shouting of "Facial" and jokes about rimjobs. Eventually, it was clear to me that I just don't talk sports or anime, I talk dicks. Sure it is a bit juvenile, but hey, not everyone identifies with basketball or Naruto, but everyone's got a dick -- well everyone who plays WoW. People like dicks; dicks should me my angle.
If you haven't noticed by now that I have an extreme penchant for irreverence, it's cool, Down Syndrome is hard and I wish you luck with that. If anyone says shit to you, let them know you got an extra chromosome, what have they got? And if you take what I say seriously and are offended with what you read here, I'm sorry. I'm sorry that you're stupid and narrow-minded.
No updates for a few days probably as I'll be gone. Maybe a drunken 5AM update, though I'm not sure how it would really be very different. ^^
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
How WoW Makes YOU Better At Life
Teamwork, Dedication, Responsibility. Nope, nope, nope. You learn about that shit on a cereal box...or at business school. I'm talking about what WoW really teaches you and how it improves your life.
Without further ado, here's what you should learn from WoW and take into the real world.
Life as a Caste System - The Sucks are real and not just in WoW. There are lots of people out there bad at not only WoW, but also life. Their opinions don't matter, and their whole species is so pathetic and clueless you can't help but feel embarrassed for them. WoW teaches you to understand that God made you better than them and reinforces the importance of separating the talented from the mediocre.
Racism is Good for Minorities - I learned by repeatedly ostracizing people of inferior breeding that they actually appreciate the attention in Guild chat. While some of these groups are dangerous in the real world and thus I've been hesitant to shower them with attention, I do think that given time we'll effectively use our WoW practice to weed these shady elements out of our community. And hey, if you can't trust them with epics, should you really trust them with your stereo?
Women Don't Deserve Equal Epics for Equal Participation - It's not their fault they're underqualified for the position, but it is your fault for letting them profit from your tendency to lower your standards just because you want to put things inside them. It's important to be upfront about this issue -- most women won't mind at all if you explain when they join that they can't earn DKP "cause they're a girl."
Never Accept Personal Responsibility - There's no reason to take the fall for something when others can be blamed instead. Pulled aggro? Bad tank. Died? Bad healers. In real life, blame your superiors(nobody), blame your inferiors (everybody), or simply stay quiet -- never admit a mistake even when called out explicitly on it.
Okay, I've lost interest; I guess I'll never be able to write a book about life lessons one can glean from playing WoW.
A few of the BDF stars have transferred over to Tichondrius recently, I'll miss them and wish them nothing but the worst. May your ratings be low, your women be fat and full of the HIV, and your eFame soiled by your embarrassing performance.
Without further ado, here's what you should learn from WoW and take into the real world.
Life as a Caste System - The Sucks are real and not just in WoW. There are lots of people out there bad at not only WoW, but also life. Their opinions don't matter, and their whole species is so pathetic and clueless you can't help but feel embarrassed for them. WoW teaches you to understand that God made you better than them and reinforces the importance of separating the talented from the mediocre.
Racism is Good for Minorities - I learned by repeatedly ostracizing people of inferior breeding that they actually appreciate the attention in Guild chat. While some of these groups are dangerous in the real world and thus I've been hesitant to shower them with attention, I do think that given time we'll effectively use our WoW practice to weed these shady elements out of our community. And hey, if you can't trust them with epics, should you really trust them with your stereo?
Women Don't Deserve Equal Epics for Equal Participation - It's not their fault they're underqualified for the position, but it is your fault for letting them profit from your tendency to lower your standards just because you want to put things inside them. It's important to be upfront about this issue -- most women won't mind at all if you explain when they join that they can't earn DKP "cause they're a girl."
Never Accept Personal Responsibility - There's no reason to take the fall for something when others can be blamed instead. Pulled aggro? Bad tank. Died? Bad healers. In real life, blame your superiors(nobody), blame your inferiors (everybody), or simply stay quiet -- never admit a mistake even when called out explicitly on it.
Okay, I've lost interest; I guess I'll never be able to write a book about life lessons one can glean from playing WoW.
A few of the BDF stars have transferred over to Tichondrius recently, I'll miss them and wish them nothing but the worst. May your ratings be low, your women be fat and full of the HIV, and your eFame soiled by your embarrassing performance.
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Skill Lance?
In Beta, I made a long thread about how Ice Lance would never be useful as mages geared up because the low coefficient made the spell scale too poorly. This was right after the damage coefficient was reduced from 43% to 21% and it seemed to me at the time that the spell would just scale well with gear. I'm a BAD beta tester.
Quite the opposite has happened. While it does at best half the damage of a scorch, the issues is not so much the damage, but the fact that the spell is basically "free" to cast. When kiting with scorch, you have to give up some distance in your kite for the 1.5 second cast. You also expose your fire tree, which if you're fire, is a very tangible cost. The fact that it is strangely more mana efficient than Fireblast is also quite odd. I picture what mage gameplay would have been like with a 43% Ice Lance, and it quite possibly would have been just spamming Skill Lance.
Ice Lance rolls into one a lot of elements of the class. Ice Lance enables us to do damage while moving, when previously we needed to stop to scorch, you can simply run FOREVER spamming Ice Lance. Back in the day to keep players in combat, we often used Counterspell, and not only because of its being off the global cooldown, but Fireblast was not necessarily enough given its 8 second cooldown, Ice Lance makes this a non-issue. It's also a low cost, reasonably mana efficient way of doing damage while our other instants are quite the opposite. It has potentially a powerful debuff that increases damage and frustrates dispelling. It's also a good casting pushback, not quite as strong as missiles, but way more practical to use -- you can often ice lance to delay that poly cast enough to get out of range of the cast because of its long range and the travel time of the lance giving you time to get a few steps after the 1 second pushback.
Why am I writing a love letter to Ice Lance? I'm not. I really had a narrow-minded perspective of the spell when I first played with it nearly a year ago; I thought it was just a damage tool to be used in conjunction with shatter, but I honestly find the damage it provides an afterthought to its other uses, especially when playing non-frost specs who still use Ice Lance heavily. It's no secret that I'm not a huge fan that caster gameplay has shifted entirely away from casting to instant cast spam. While one can certainly argue that Arcane Explosion, Blastwave, Cone of Cold and Fireblast have long been PvP stables for mages and are all instants as well, they are limited by high mana costs and extremely limited range.
My misunderstanding in Beta was also one of greatly overestimating how much gear would scale. I imagined a PvP landscape of players with 1500 damage and similar health to what we see in Season 2, which is way the fuck off. Perhaps the assumptions were idiotic, but when you think of how level 60 blues scaled into their level 60 epic equivalents, it isn't that stupid.
On the balance topic, I believe that WoW does not sufficiently reward risk taking. Fake casting was one of the major factors that separated the weak PvPers from the strong in 1.0, but who needs to fake cast when you can use instants exclusively. The cost of going from casting to using instants for lots of classes is not that high. This logic applies in lots of ways and I'm not really talking exclusively about casting, but I feel slightly that although the goal of the expanded health pools in BC was to reduce one-shotting and thus increase the skill and responsiveness of player versus player combat, most strategies have devolved into various types of rushdowns.
Quite the opposite has happened. While it does at best half the damage of a scorch, the issues is not so much the damage, but the fact that the spell is basically "free" to cast. When kiting with scorch, you have to give up some distance in your kite for the 1.5 second cast. You also expose your fire tree, which if you're fire, is a very tangible cost. The fact that it is strangely more mana efficient than Fireblast is also quite odd. I picture what mage gameplay would have been like with a 43% Ice Lance, and it quite possibly would have been just spamming Skill Lance.
Ice Lance rolls into one a lot of elements of the class. Ice Lance enables us to do damage while moving, when previously we needed to stop to scorch, you can simply run FOREVER spamming Ice Lance. Back in the day to keep players in combat, we often used Counterspell, and not only because of its being off the global cooldown, but Fireblast was not necessarily enough given its 8 second cooldown, Ice Lance makes this a non-issue. It's also a low cost, reasonably mana efficient way of doing damage while our other instants are quite the opposite. It has potentially a powerful debuff that increases damage and frustrates dispelling. It's also a good casting pushback, not quite as strong as missiles, but way more practical to use -- you can often ice lance to delay that poly cast enough to get out of range of the cast because of its long range and the travel time of the lance giving you time to get a few steps after the 1 second pushback.
Why am I writing a love letter to Ice Lance? I'm not. I really had a narrow-minded perspective of the spell when I first played with it nearly a year ago; I thought it was just a damage tool to be used in conjunction with shatter, but I honestly find the damage it provides an afterthought to its other uses, especially when playing non-frost specs who still use Ice Lance heavily. It's no secret that I'm not a huge fan that caster gameplay has shifted entirely away from casting to instant cast spam. While one can certainly argue that Arcane Explosion, Blastwave, Cone of Cold and Fireblast have long been PvP stables for mages and are all instants as well, they are limited by high mana costs and extremely limited range.
My misunderstanding in Beta was also one of greatly overestimating how much gear would scale. I imagined a PvP landscape of players with 1500 damage and similar health to what we see in Season 2, which is way the fuck off. Perhaps the assumptions were idiotic, but when you think of how level 60 blues scaled into their level 60 epic equivalents, it isn't that stupid.
On the balance topic, I believe that WoW does not sufficiently reward risk taking. Fake casting was one of the major factors that separated the weak PvPers from the strong in 1.0, but who needs to fake cast when you can use instants exclusively. The cost of going from casting to using instants for lots of classes is not that high. This logic applies in lots of ways and I'm not really talking exclusively about casting, but I feel slightly that although the goal of the expanded health pools in BC was to reduce one-shotting and thus increase the skill and responsiveness of player versus player combat, most strategies have devolved into various types of rushdowns.
Monday, September 17, 2007
If I Die Before I Wake
As I sit here eating the remaining sushi that the partners purchased for the office earlier today, I'm thinking two things. First, lunch was nearly 12 hours ago at this point and I'll probably be dead before the morning to food poisoning. Second, it's time for a sick blog entry. (that was a play on sick, wow that's bad)
Yes, I'm still playing 38/23, and I haven't changed my mind about its potential yet. I'm hoping to line up some duels with a few people in the next few days to try out some ideas, but I do plan on sticking elemental for at least a little while. (That includes arenas!) See, playing a bad spec is like when you and another dude are practicing your "sweet kino" moves on each other and one thing leads to another and, well, you really just don't know who you are anymore. All you know is that you've changed and you can't go back.
Whenever I get around to starting this next vid, the majority of it will be 38/23 with some older clips from back when I played WE on our 4DPS team. Albis4 was 37/24 which is pretty similar, and is largely my inspiration for doing this vid -- think Arathi Basin instead of World PvP though. LOL. Worse editing, worse UI, but more grenades is the goal.
His 37/24 spec is interesting and was what I played when I first wanted to try level 70 elemental variants -- basically, you take full Imp CoC and spam it whenever its up. Obviously you get a good deal more damage out of having fully talented CoC, but you give up arctic reach (not a huge deal) and you end up spending a LOT more mana. Inevitably, I find using CoC above rank 1 prohibitive the majority of the time. For world PvP where you know you're taking on 1-2 people probably, it's a better spec but when you're going from fight to fight as you would inside a BG or when you're in a long arena match, you really can't afford the extra 500 mana each cast. Sure you can pick up MoE at the cost of some fire damage, but considering the mediocrity of elemental's damage output, I think you need all the damage you can get.
Apparently a few more of the Stormstrike teams have died over the last couple days. Hopefully the remnants can fill the missing pieces and have new rosters for next season; the termination of WSVG has really felt like the "end" of season two. The remaining weeks till titles are awarded (I assume the tournament is not happening at this point) are very much an afterthought, at least on my mind. I'm generally clueless as to what's going on these recent weeks, and logging in to learn that so-and-so has quit basically leaves you feeling like when your girlfriend drunk dials you, "Hey I just won $20 on a bet with some idiot -- he didn't think I could suck the cream filling out of a Twinkie without damaging the sponge cake." Proud. I mean, frustrated.
Yes, I'm still playing 38/23, and I haven't changed my mind about its potential yet. I'm hoping to line up some duels with a few people in the next few days to try out some ideas, but I do plan on sticking elemental for at least a little while. (That includes arenas!) See, playing a bad spec is like when you and another dude are practicing your "sweet kino" moves on each other and one thing leads to another and, well, you really just don't know who you are anymore. All you know is that you've changed and you can't go back.
Whenever I get around to starting this next vid, the majority of it will be 38/23 with some older clips from back when I played WE on our 4DPS team. Albis4 was 37/24 which is pretty similar, and is largely my inspiration for doing this vid -- think Arathi Basin instead of World PvP though. LOL. Worse editing, worse UI, but more grenades is the goal.
His 37/24 spec is interesting and was what I played when I first wanted to try level 70 elemental variants -- basically, you take full Imp CoC and spam it whenever its up. Obviously you get a good deal more damage out of having fully talented CoC, but you give up arctic reach (not a huge deal) and you end up spending a LOT more mana. Inevitably, I find using CoC above rank 1 prohibitive the majority of the time. For world PvP where you know you're taking on 1-2 people probably, it's a better spec but when you're going from fight to fight as you would inside a BG or when you're in a long arena match, you really can't afford the extra 500 mana each cast. Sure you can pick up MoE at the cost of some fire damage, but considering the mediocrity of elemental's damage output, I think you need all the damage you can get.
Apparently a few more of the Stormstrike teams have died over the last couple days. Hopefully the remnants can fill the missing pieces and have new rosters for next season; the termination of WSVG has really felt like the "end" of season two. The remaining weeks till titles are awarded (I assume the tournament is not happening at this point) are very much an afterthought, at least on my mind. I'm generally clueless as to what's going on these recent weeks, and logging in to learn that so-and-so has quit basically leaves you feeling like when your girlfriend drunk dials you, "Hey I just won $20 on a bet with some idiot -- he didn't think I could suck the cream filling out of a Twinkie without damaging the sponge cake." Proud. I mean, frustrated.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Has Laddy Turned Into a Ming?
See, my blog posts are like the box of chocolates the chubby girl in 3rd grade who had a crush on you tried to give you. She was really sweet but still, you know, kind of chubby. Sure you felt bad accepting a gift from her when you weren't interested, but you know what, chocolate is fucking delicious. So when your learned the box was empty and she broke down crying "Don't blame me, blame the chocolates -- they were too delicious, " you were conflicted. Next thing you know, one thing leads to another and you're now a man; you smacked the box out her hands and told the whole class what she'd done. (3rd grade you sickos)
So my posts lack content as of late. I should be talking about Arena PvP and why this matrix counters that matrix and who really gives a fuck -- all that can wait. How the hell can we possibly play WoW when its future as a possible eSport hangs so precariously in the balance? And didn't I mention that Owen Wilson thing? It wasn't heroin people, he was kicked off his WSVG LA team. Apparently, he played priest, but could only play shadow.
Okay, serious raddy here. It's my belief that much of the WoW burnout is a product of players limiting their WoW interest to Arena PvP. I think this is generally unfulfilling for the majority of players for many reasons: lack of competition, team scheduling issues, repetition, and the rock/paper/scissors nature of some of the arena brackets. With dueling relegated to mostly a PTR thing and World PvP dead, this leaves BGs as the primary source for PvP. I love BGs, but many players don't. On that same train of thought, the nature of my blogging is going to change with my changing perspective on how best to take advantage of PvP within WoW. I'm not going casual or anything, if anything the opposite (I think arena is generally lower skill than other forms of PvP), but I'm not going to be updating my blog with countless "We went 18-1 last night and gained 30 rating blah blah" because such content is fucking boring and I want to drink a smoothie of my genitals every time I read one of those updates. Okay, now excuse me while I go back to being an asshat.
So my posts lack content as of late. I should be talking about Arena PvP and why this matrix counters that matrix and who really gives a fuck -- all that can wait. How the hell can we possibly play WoW when its future as a possible eSport hangs so precariously in the balance? And didn't I mention that Owen Wilson thing? It wasn't heroin people, he was kicked off his WSVG LA team. Apparently, he played priest, but could only play shadow.
Okay, serious raddy here. It's my belief that much of the WoW burnout is a product of players limiting their WoW interest to Arena PvP. I think this is generally unfulfilling for the majority of players for many reasons: lack of competition, team scheduling issues, repetition, and the rock/paper/scissors nature of some of the arena brackets. With dueling relegated to mostly a PTR thing and World PvP dead, this leaves BGs as the primary source for PvP. I love BGs, but many players don't. On that same train of thought, the nature of my blogging is going to change with my changing perspective on how best to take advantage of PvP within WoW. I'm not going casual or anything, if anything the opposite (I think arena is generally lower skill than other forms of PvP), but I'm not going to be updating my blog with countless "We went 18-1 last night and gained 30 rating blah blah" because such content is fucking boring and I want to drink a smoothie of my genitals every time I read one of those updates. Okay, now excuse me while I go back to being an asshat.
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