As many of you know, Left4dead 2 came out about a week ago, ive been playing this game for a while and recommend it for hours and hours of fun. But Left4dead 2??? Its basically the same concept of the first game with new zombies, a few new weapons and new levels, other than that, its the same game!!

Honestly, would you spend another 50 bucks for almost the same game? Don’t get me wrong, the first one was great, but the second one… I don’t think so. Some of the new zombies look pretty interesting though, I looked all around and haven’t been able to find out anything about the new special infected, so im posting it here for you guys:

Charger: Some people say its like a second tank, the charger is a new special infected that’s able to grab a human survivor and seperate him from his teammates but dragging him in his right arm into a wall or a solid object, after that the Charger continues to pound them into the ground until an ally is able to free them. The Charger is supposed to do massive damage.

Jockey: Ok this one made me laugh, its called the Jocket, it kind of looks like Gollum from Lord of the Rings, that aside, its able to jump on to the survivors head and attack them while giving control as to which direction to move the human survivor, its great for separating the survivors apart.

Spitter: This new infected looked kind of lame to me, nothing really interesting and not much strategy involved, but its main goal is to spit a acid phlegm bomb onto the survivors, this works especially well when the survivors are cornered. When the Spitter dies, it leaves a puddle that does the same amount of damage as her spit bomb. She is very useful when it comes to igniting gas cans when the survivors are near them, but other than that, shes done.

Wandering Witch: Ok this is pretty cool, the Witch that always sat and cried and sometimes glitched when the survivors would get near her is back and this time with a vengeance, she gets to wander around in this game during the day and can sneak up on the survivors at any given moment, she also cries less and im told that she can sing?? uhh oookay… This way the survivors will have a harder time killing her.

The other 4 old infected characters still remain as Smoker, Hunter, Tank and Boomer. There is also some new survivors which include Coach, Ellis, Nick, and Rochelle. The up side to this game is, you get a new selection of zombies which can put u in some great positions and it doesn’t get tiring playing the same old 4 infected anymore, here you have variety and alot of cool new stuff.

I just wanna play the new infected, but other than that, its the same game.. Stay tuned.

I’ve always been playing a Night Elf hunter, and to be honest I have been feeling a little bored with the animations lately. I was considering to buy it a race change. Originally it was a male Nelf, but I turned it into a female Nelf when the option became a reality.

Pondering whether to go for Dwarf or Draenei, I decided for Dwarf. I’ve never liked male dwarfs, but I think they fit as a hunter. Regardless of this I chose a female nonetheless. I mailed a few heirlooms to her and started leveling in Borean. It was no longer boring. I like a set of deadly DPS packed into one little character, and as a hunter in need of overview I felt I did the right choice.

I am still sure of my call, my Nelf hunter formerly known as “Larsi” is now the Dwarf known as “Aimlol”. Keep your eyes open for this one! I’ll BW you into pieces in 2 seconds. (Not really, but maybe I’ll get some room while leveling if you think I am able to.) Scratch that last comment! I challenge anyone! (Not really.)

L

I think this is the shooting that will turn it all around for those who desire a better America. I think that this shooting, even though the boy didn’t die from his wounds, will really be taken to heart by the NRA. After all, when we learn that babies are being killed by defective cribs, we get rid of the cribs through the recall process. We don’t advocate for the purchase of more defective cribs. I’m positive that the NRA will now make the connection between gun ownership and shootings. Sure. Of. It.

This is why we need to have more guns. Most folks don’t know how much fun they are, especially when drunk! They’re just soooo much fun! Oh sure, tens of thousands of Americans are killed every year by them….but guns are soooo much fun! And what’s more American than having ignorant fun!

hyjal 2

We took the path down, circling the mountainous cliffs around the World Tree, until we reached the small pools and ponds that ringed the ancient battlefield. When I’d first set foot in Hyjal, I’d been more interested in the landscape – the sweeping cliffs, the scattered forests, the paths that wound round and round forever. But after encountering Kesryn by chance, my attentions shifted somewhat.

She was in what she called her traveling clothes, and we’d planned to take a posed shot of her and Baptyst, the faithful companion she’d recently tamed in Winterspring. The photo I actually took for her, though, was as she stared wistfully at the World Tree – her thoughts, I suppose, lost in whatever memories she had of her home and the stories she’d been told growing up.

Kesryn and I stayed in touch after this, if only to exchange stories while I struggled through school and she struggled through Outland once the Dark Portal opened. It has been almost three years since this moment, so needless to say I was surprised when, upon discovering I was crafting a memoir of my travels, she insisted that I include this photo, her only memory of her quiet, personal trip to Hyjal.

hyjal 1

“Why do you suppose nobody comes here?” the Huntress asked me.

Her name was Kesryn Starsinger, and we’d run into each other during exploration of Hyjal. I’d grown up hearing of the great battle that ensued at the World Tree, as had she, though her recollection of the events were greatly skewed by a sort of Night Elf bias (apparently in Teldrassil they love to take credit for all of this).

I was perched in a tree, trying to balance myself and the cumbersome Snapper to take a shot when she walked right out in front of it. Ah well, I thought to myself, gives it some perspective.

“I’m not really sure,” I mentioned as we walked the paths on our mounts. The air was still around us, full of the rich colors of the untouched foliage and the ember glow of the setting sun. “They talk about it so much, you’d think someone would be interested.”

In the few moments we’d spent together, I’d quickly learned that Kesryn was not the type to stay quiet long (“You wouldn’t believe it, my sisters and I drove Father crazy back when I lived at home, it’s the whole reason I travel now!”) – however, as she paused and looked over her shoulder at Archimonde’s bones tangled in ancient wood, there was a sort of melancholy about her.

“I’d like a photo, if that’s alright,” she said, and to my surprise, reached into her backpack and pulled out a Snapper of her own. “Down there.” She motioned to the pools at the bottom of the cliffs, and as my eyes traced the mountain line I could see a path that angled down.

My hearthstone had not yet recharged from the last time I’d used it, so I nodded to her, and we rode down in silence with Archimonde’s body casting a dark, forbidding shadow after us.

ungoro roar

“Wow,” Kesryn murmured, staring up at the shimmering night sky. “Shawni, have you ever seen so many stars?” Shawnisi, who was sitting next to the fire, glanced up as well.

“Hmm, can’t say I have,” she replied thoughtfully. Dressed in a traveling tunic and patched cloth pants, she turned her attention back to her sewing, delicately drawing a needle and thread through the shimmering fabric of her robe. “Probably because I’m spending more time fixing my damn clothing than stargazing.”

“I said I was sorry about the devilsaur,” Kesryn retorted, rolling her eyes. “How many times are we going to rehash this?”

“How about as many times as I had to visit the spirit healer today?”

“Oh please, you’re a Priest, you can heal -” Kesryn paused as Shawnisi turned a bloodchilling blue-eyed glare on her, and sighed. “Alright, alright, I’ll go get more firewood.”

Grabbing an empty pack and climbing up on the saddle of her hulking stalker mount, she worked her way around the camp’s exterior, gathering any spare branches she could find that weren’t soaked through from the crater’s damp environment. Pausing at one cliff edge, she stared up at the moon with a wistful expression.

“Kind of makes you miss home, doesn’t it?” she asked the great beast, patting the side of his neck. The stalker purred in response. “You know, me and my sisters, we used to howl at the moon all the time. It would drive Father crazy! You ever done that?” The cat only grunted. “It’s pretty easy, you know, just make as much noise as you can!” With that, she tilted her head back and let out a warbling, obnoxious howl that bounced off the high mountain walls beside them and echoed back to her. “Now, you try,” she encouraged.

Her mount paused a moment, then arched its back and let out a deep roar so loud she had to clap her hands over her ears. It was so long and so loud, that by the time the beast finally shook its head and silenced itself, the noise still echoed down into the crater below, where gutteral cries rose up from the prehistoric beasts that wandered around the tar pits. Kesryn snorted back a laugh and scritched the cat’s head.

“Showoff,” she muttered.

So we recorded our next show last night (late last night, /snore), and for the first time in a long time, we didn’t have an interview ready. We ended up spending the whole show talking about the finer points of some of the topics that have been bandied about lately, and I really think we got an excellent show out of it. It will be up as soon as Faeghleis chops out all the background noise and subverbal cussing.

Do any of you guys have anything you’d like us to cover on future episodes? Obviously, we’ll always cover any hunter news and try to have an interview, but for when it’s just the three of us, what type of stuff would you guys like to hear us talk about?

많은사람들이 내가 한재훈에게 드세다고 생각하지만
나는 억울하다. 사람들이 앞에 있을때와 없을때
확연히 차이나는 저 다중인격 한재훈은 겉으로는
자상한척 연기하지만 내가 진짜로 아파하거나
괴로워할때 희열을 느끼는 야비한 인간이다.
나는 한재훈한테 맞고 여러번 운적도 있다.

엄마가 보내주셨다.
눈물이 주륵주륵… 집에 자주 갈게요 ;_;

Anoche despues de terminar las daylies del evento de thanksgiving, fui a un run al dungeon mencionado. Fui con mi compa Gsquall. Era la primera ves que iba a un dungeon abierto. Me agrado mucho el hecho de poder usar mi montura en un dungeon XD.

Acabamos en media hora el run, y no paso a mayores. Como siempre cuando voy con el, el mata y yo looteo. Y saque equipo bueno para mis 2 aspectos de Dsvacalala.

Esta noche queria ir de nuevo pero se me olvido que ayer tenia que haber pagado. Y hoy tengo la cuenta congelada XD. Lo que mas me pesa es perder los 12k de exp aproximada, que me dan por las daylies del evento de accion de gracias. Y que los ganas nada mas por cocinar. Pero bueno sin llorar.

Mas noche pagare o hare que alguien lo pague por mi (@coldalchemy te estoy viendo).

Para estas noches sin juegos, agradezco al FSM o MEV en español, que tengo mucho Anime en pendiente.

Cover of Björk's Homogenic (One Little Indian, 1997); image courtesy of slantmagazine.com

Cover for Björk's Vespertine (One Little Indian, 2001); image courtesy of harmony-korine.com

When I began conceptualizing this blog in the ol’ brainspace, one of the first sections I came up with was “Records That Made Me a Feminist.” I knew Björk was going to get at least one entry. Homogenic and Vespertine each played a vital part of shaping my politics. So, I figured out I’d probably have to write about them together.

Pairing albums for this section of the blog is something I originally wanted to do this when covering Erykah Badu’s Mama’s Gun, which I started listening to around the same time as PJ Harvey’s Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea. I liked the idea of dialoguing seemingly dissimilar work by female artists with one another, but I feared covering those two albums together would short-shrift the artists who made them. However, talking about two distinct pieces of work by one woman seemed easier. And essential. So here we go.

I must admit that covering Björk’s 1997 and 2000 full-length releases present its own political challenges that makes me think critically about how I understand and practice feminism. Both of these albums made me a feminist largely because of the boys I was preoccupied with at the time.

But while my initial reception and resulting connections to them were tied up with potentially normative feelings around romantic angst and heterosexual coupling, I feel the albums speak to my development at the time as well as transcend it. In other words, Homogenic and Vespertine may remind me of boys I used to date, but they speak to larger, more overtly feminist issues as well.

Of course, being a feminist doesn’t mean you can’t like boys or be hung up on them from time to time, so long as you don’t let them run your life. Which I don’t think Björk endorses in either of these records, even though she herself has an ambivalent relationship with feminism (though not with calling out the music industry’s sexist practices of attributing male engineers and instrumental songwriters).

Importantly, as both albums were prescient to my development, they also went over my head when I first listened to them. Debut and Post were more accessible and, as a result, I liked them almost immediately. It was hard for 10-year-old me not to fall for the girl dancing through New York City on a flatbed in the music video for “Big Time Sensuality.”

But Björk’s next two albums took more time to process. Both albums mark advances in the artist’s production sensibilities, approaches to music-making, and interest in electronic instrumentation. Thus, just as Björk had to evolve as a musician before creating these albums, I had to mature a bit as a person before liking them as a fan.

So, Homogenic came out just as I was starting high school. I don’t exactly remember when I bought it, but I think it was sometime toward the end of junior year. I completely ignored it at the time. Or rather, I listened to it once, went “ooh, so angry!” and put Post back on.

The particulars I’ll keep to myself for the sake of decorum. Suffice it to say that I dated someone for a little while, fell in love, we broke up, and I spent a little over a year trying to get us back together. It didn’t work out. Eventually I got over him and whatever I thought we were, but not without some pain and denial and then serious personal re-evaluation. The healing process involved some righteous anger, loud parties, several bottles of wine and other goodies, and burgeoning feminist development. After a rough start, 19 turned out to be a pretty okay year. Homogenic was its soundtrack.

Now, I have no problem acknowledging that this guy was a total jerk to me. But feminism isn’t only about recognizing and calling out chauvinistic bullshit. It’s also about self-empowerment, personal accountability, and un-learning heteronormativity and patriarchal co-dependence. It isn’t always just the guy’s fault, even when it is.

Thus, I also have to own up to being really needy and delusional at the time. I pinned my worth on whoever I was dating without questioning whether being with them was actually good for me. So I projected my own big feelings and insecurities on someone who clearly didn’t want to be with me. I was ignoring the reality of the situation and, as a result, my own well-being. I finally recognized what I was doing when confronted with the lyric “How could I be so immature to think he could replace the missing elements in me — how extremely lazy of me.” 

Kinda appropriate that a break-up record got me over mine, no? Apparently, Björk made the album after breaking up with drum’n'bass musician Goldie while they were working on their own project. Hence lines like “So you left me on my own to complete the mission, but now I’m leaving it all behind.” But it pretty much hit all the right notes of melancholy, indignation, rage, and feisty recovery for me. I’m a quarter Norwegian on my mother’s side, so even the line ”I thought I could organize freedom — how Scandinavian of me” in “Hunter” applied.

Attention must be paid to the album’s sound and how it marked a musical departure for Björk. Post was an eclectic mix that boasted songs like “Army of Me,” “Enjoy,” and “Headphones,” that opened up her sound to include state-of-the-art aggressive digital distortion and serene electronic minimalism.

While this was evident in the production work Tricky and 808 State’s Graham Massey did on Post, it wasn’t the focus. It would come to define the artistic work she began doing with producers like Mark Bell on Homogenic and would continue to do with Matmos on Vespertine. But I’d hedge that most casual listeners just remember Post’s ”It’s Oh So Quiet,” which was produced by Björk’s then-mainstay, Nellee Hooper, the man responsible for all the production on her breakthrough Debut. He was also responsible for “Hyperballad,” which I’d argue suggests the artist’s shift, which is fully evident on her next album.

Man, I wish I could post the music video, but WMG has apparently disabled the audio. All the more reason to check out Michel Gondry’s Directors Label DVD, or any of the other myriad DVD titles that have documented her videography.

So Homogenic marks a transition from being a pop star to an artist who challenges her listeners’ ears and expectations with each release. By 1997, we also heard alternative pop stars like Beck and Radiohead establish themselves similarly with Odelay and OK Computer. We would hear Radiohead do it again in 2000 with the mind-blowing Kid A, where they really demonstrated their love for electronic instrumentation and experimental production techniques.

Björk was already on this path in 1997, but while Radiohead looked outward toward the fallabilities of modern life, Björk looked inward at the seductive pleasures and wobbly peculiarities of domestic life and partnership on her next record, rapturing at her voice’s clicks and finding percussive possibilities out of shuffled decks of cards. I don’t think these innovations went unnoticed when Radiohead went to work on In Rainbows. To me, Vespertine’s influence is all over a song like “Nude,” which was originally an outtake from OK Computer. This is further confirmed by the band’s rendition of Homogenic’s ”Unravel” as a tip of the hat. As if lead singer Thom Yorke’s backing vocals on “Náttúra” aren’t enough.

Hmmm. Maybe at some point, I’ll consider Yorke’s duets with Björk and PJ Harvey. Yorke is one of my favorite vocalists, a fact confirmed by a recent revisit of Hail to the Thief. If one of my friends ran a blog on male masculinity and music culture, I’d pen a guest entry in a second.

But I was afflicted with a troubled mind when Vespertine first came out. In addition to boy heartache, I was going through some considerable familial strife. I was also starting my first semester of college, so a tackier person might blame 9/11.

After seeing the music video for “Hidden Place,” I dutifully bought the album, along with My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless, another at-the-time inscrutable release, at the Tower Records by campus. I listened to the album a few times, but my head was not in the right place for it. It was too contented and quiet. I couldn’t hear it. And then for a little while all I could hear was Homogenic at full volume.

Stills from the video that convinced me to buy "Vespertine"; image courtesy of unit.bjork.com

To be blunt, Vespertine didn’t really make sense to me until I started having sex. Critics like Ryan Dombal would seem to concur. I remember seeing her performance of ”Cocoon” on Jay Leno and thinking that it was really quiet, but totally not getting how micro-embodied intimacy is the song’s entire purpose. While I had a good understanding of mechanics and had engaged in related activities before going into my first listen, I don’t think a song like “Cocoon” makes sense to a person unless they’ve experienced it, to speak euphemistically, in a corporeal sense.

BTW, yes that is Bill O’Reilly adjusting his tie. If he was actually listening to the song, I’m sure he’d be appalled by how delightfully, defiantly sexual this song is and that it was performed uncensored on network television. Watching it now, I can’t believe I wasn’t really listening. Maybe I should have been leaning into the television.  

Again, the particulars here aren’t really important. I was a week or so into being 20 and, frankly,  didn’t want to be a virgin anymore. The guy was someone willing, it was fun, and didn’t last very long.

In short, the romanticism and emotional connectedness that is often built into such an experience was not there, nor do I regret that it wasn’t. I would find that later, which would make my understanding of those aspects of Vespertine more profound and further develop my feminist principles.

I bring sex into the discussion because I, to borrow briefly from Arrested Development’s George Michael Bluth, find Vespertine’s complex eroticism one of its most key contributions to what made me a feminist. Though perhaps a stretch and certainly not without its own distinctions, I tend to think of this album in accord with Audre Lorde’s wonderful essay “Uses of the erotic: the erotic as power.”

And while I don’t know if this entry’s subject has read the essay, something tells me that the same woman who identifies as bisexual and recognizes the erotic potential in mundane activities would concur with much of the theorist’s thesis.

Of course, feminists must also have the wherewithal to recognize that eroticism, even ephemeral evidence like orgasms, are luxuries to some women and girls. Not everyone is given a space, a country, or a political system that allows them the safety and freedom to enjoy and explore these possibilities.

But eroticism isn’t about cataloging who did what to whom for Björk. As David Fricke gestured toward in his review of the album for Rolling Stone, it might be everywhere, at once tangible and theoretical.

This is where I think it’s important to consider the album’s production sensibilities and Björk’s particular uses of her voice. In addition to non-conventional practices like sampling and turning seemingly non-musical domestic items into instruments, the singer’s voice is the album’s real focus. Because of how closely she’s miked, you can hear every tic, breath, whispered turn of phrase, and any other sound coming out of her mouth. As a result, her voice becomes a varied and vital instrument, an idea she has continued to develop and that has continued to stay with me.

The Tier 10 set bonuses will come with the newest patch 3.3.

All set bonuses are listed below, classes arranged in alphabetical order.

Death Knight

• Death Knight T10 Tank 2P Bonus – Increases the damage done by your Death and Decay ability by 20%.
• Death Knight T10 Tank 4P Bonus – When you activate Blood Tap, you gain 12% damage reduction from all attacks for 10 sec.
• Death Knight T10 Melee 2P Bonus – Your Obliterate, Scourge Strike, and Death Strike abilities deal 10% increased damage.
• Death Knight T10 Melee 4P Bonus – Whenever all your runes are on cooldown, you gain 3% increased damage done with weapons, spells, and abilities for the next 15 sec.

Druid

• Druid T10 Restoration 2P Bonus – The healing granted by your Wild Growth spell reduces 0% less over time.
• Druid T10 Restoration 4P Bonus – Each time your Rejuvenation spell heals a target, it has a 2% chance to jump to a new target at full duration.
• Druid T10 Balance 2P Bonus – When you gain Clearcasting from your Omen of Clarity talent, you deal 10% additional Nature and Arcane damage for 6 sec.
• Druid T10 Balance 4P Bonus – Reduces the cooldown on your Eclipse talent by 6000.
• Druid T10 Feral 2P Bonus – Your Swipe (Bear) and Lacerate abilities deal 20% additional damage and the cost of your Rip ability is reduced by 10 energy.
• Druid T10 Feral 4P Bonus – Your Enrage ability no longer decreases your armor and instead decreases all damage taken by 12%, and the periodic damage done by your Rake ability can now be a critical strike.

Hunter

• Hunter T10 2P Bonus – Your Auto Shots have a 5% chance to cause you and your pet to deal 15% additional damage for until cancelled.
• Hunter T10 4P Bonus – Your Shot abilities deal 4% increased damage to targets afflicted with Viper Sting, Serpent Sting, or Wyvern Sting.

Mage

• Mage T10 2P Bonus – Your Mirror Image ability also causes you to deal 15% additional damage for 10 sec.
• Mage T10 4P Bonus – Your Hot Streak, Missile Barrage, and Brain Freeze talents also grant you 12% haste for 3 sec when the effect of the talent is consumed.

Paladin

• Paladin T10 Holy 2P Bonus – The cooldown on your Divine Favor talent is reduced by 60 sec.
• Paladin T10 Holy 4P Bonus – Your Holy Shock spell causes the next Holy Light you cast within 10 sec to have 0.3 sec reduced cast time.
• Paladin T10 Protection 2P Bonus – Your Hammer of the Righteous ability deals 20% increased damage.
• Paladin T10 Protection 4P Bonus – When you activate Divine Plea, you gain 12% dodge for 10 sec.
• Paladin T10 Retribution 2P Bonus – Your Seals and Judgements deal 10% additional damage.
• Paladin T10 Retribution 4P Bonus – Your melee attacks have a 4% chance to reset the cooldown on your Divine Storm ability.

Priest

• Priest T10 Healer 2P Bonus – After your Pain Suppression and Guardian Spirit talents expire on your target, they grant your target 10% increased healing received for 10 sec.
• Priest T10 Healer 4P Bonus – Your Flash Heal spell has a 15% chance to reset the cooldown on your Circle of Healing and Penance Spells.
• Priest T10 Shadow 2P Bonus – The critical strike chance of your Shadow Word: Pain, Devouring Plague, and Vampiric Touch spells is increased by 5%.
• Priest T10 Shadow 4P Bonus – Reduces the channel duration and period of your Mind Flay spell by 51%.

Rogue

• Rogue T10 2P Bonus – Gives your melee finishing moves a 13% chance to add 3 combo points to your target.
• Rogue T10 4P Bonus – Your Tricks of the Trade ability now grants you 15 energy instead of costing energy.

Shaman

• Shaman T10 Restoration 2P Bonus – Your Riptide spell grants 20% spell haste for your next spellcast.
• Shaman T10 Restoration 4P Bonus – Your Chain Heal critical strikes cause the target to heal for 25% of the healed amount over until cancelled.
• Shaman T10 Elemental 2P Bonus – Your Lightning Bolt spell reduces the remaining cooldown on your Elemental Mastery talent by 1 sec.
• Shaman T10 Elemental 4P Bonus – The cooldown on your Lava Burst ability is reduced by 15 sec.
• Shaman T10 Enhancement 2P Bonus – When you activate your Shamanistic Rage ability you also deal 12% additional damage for 15 sec.
• Shaman T10 Enhancement 4P Bonus – Each time the beneficial effect of your Maelstrom Weapon talent reaches 5 charges, you have a 15% chance to gain 20% attack power for 10 sec.

Warlock

• Warlock T10 2P Bonus – The critical strike chance of your Shadowbolt, Incinerate, and Corruption spells is increased by 5%.
• Warlock T10 4P Bonus – Each time your Immolate and Unstable Affliction spells deal periodic damage, you have a 15% chance to gain 12% spell haste for 10 sec.

Warrior

• Warrior T10 Protection 2P Bonus – Your Shield Slam and Shockwave abilities deal 20% increased damage.
• Warrior T10 Protection 4P Bonus – Your Bloodrage ability no longer costs health to use, and now causes you to absorb damage equal to 20% of your maximum health. Lasts until cancelled.
• Warrior T10 Melee 2P Bonus – When your Rend and Deep Wounds abilities deal damage you have a 2% chance to gain 20% attack power for until cancelled.
• Warrior T10 Melee 4P Bonus – You have a 20% chance for your Blood Surge and Sudden Death talents to grant 2 charges of their effect instead of 1 and for the duration of the effect to be increased by 100%.

시까만집은 동굴같아서 좋다
점점점 우중충한 날씨가 좋아지네..

날씨만큼이나 기분도 축축하다.

Wow, I feel good today.  I have in my mind things that have been a burden for me, things like what to do about this or that, things.  Like clutter.  They’ve been like a messy house up there, hanging out in my body and my mind.  Ya well.  Suddenly, I’m just making some choices and I’m feeling really good.   Really letting go of some things that I had trouble understanding were the very things bringing me down.  I like things that are from humanity, that are good for humanity.  This is where I get so tripped up with others in the world.  Those that are following something else, it tends to make me feel powerless, but when I hear of something that humans come up with that will help humans, this is exciting to me.  Dr. Allan Hunter has done one of those things by writing a book about writing your own memoirs.  And although he says it can be a long, calm process, I can see it, depending on the person, have much more of a quick effect than he thinks!!!  What an exciting day!

Here’s the link:

The interview with Kripparrian in  The Hunting Party Podcast #14 gave us plenty to think about.  While the message that most focused on (that of stack your cooldowns) is important, I thought another of Kripparian’s comments also deserved its own post: that you need a mindset of self-improvement.

In this post I will go over how we arrive at this mindset and then what it looks like when practiced well.

I do not want to put words into Kripparrian’s mouth, and so this is only what the mindset means to me.  The mindset entails always trying to do better next time.  It means always looking at things in terms of how they affect dps.  It means searching far and wide for new ideas, and making sure that they are good ones.  It means experimenting and testing.  It means holding little sacred (dps-wise) and keeping an open mind.

This sounds a bit like the scientific method, and rightly so.  But this is a game, right?  Why is rigorous examination necessary in this thing you do for fun?

The answer is a little long but obvious.  We are first motivated to do better dps.  But when we reach a certain point in the PvE endgame, we realize that better dps will no longer come in huge shifts: no new talents, no new levels, and stat increases from new gear are usually drops in the bucket.  Rather, better dps comes from adding up the little things, like stacking cooldowns or maybe getting that runspeed enchant.  These little changes, ranging from re-spec’ing a few talent points to sitting up straight in front of your computer, are plentiful as possibilities.

Because the potential changes are plentiful, they can add up when made to be huge changes in our dps.  However, they are also typically small individually and often cannot be found without help and/or tools.  To find them, we have to search a lot, far and wide and all the time.  We have to observe and question and experiment.  We know the little things are worth looking for, but we also know that to find a lot of them we have to be looking for them whenever we can.  As we internalize this search through its repetition and make it habitual (if not obsessive), it becomes a mindset of self-improvement.  The search for better dps becomes part of the way we play the game.

In this way a mindset is an effect, the product of various motivations.  However, it also ends up being a cause: the better your mindset for finding improved dps, the better your dps will be in result. The more rigor and objectivity you have, the more reliable your returns.  The more systematic and careful you are, the fewer things you miss on average.  Basically, the better you learn how to fish, the more fish you’re likely to catch.  Put another way, striving for self-improvement is good, but some mindsets for it are better than others.

Having described how we arrive at a mindset of self-improvement, and having given a rationale for adopting a good one, I believe I can now outline principles that lay behind such a mindset.  Different hunters do different things to discern potential dps improvements; however, from what I have seen these behaviors (the good ones) are usually structured along the same lines.  I phrase these principles as imperatives because this is a guide, but really they are also meant to be descriptive.

keep an open mind: This sounds trite and obvious, I know.  But I mention it because I see hunters holding as gospel things that were only true in The Burning Crusade.  I say it because I run into hunters still using cats only because they stopped questioning whether or not cats were still the best non-BM pet dps.  Everything should be subject to scrutiny and nothing should be given a free pass.  For if you consistently ignore something, that absolutely precludes you from working to improve it.

observe: It is not enough to just keep an open mind, you also have to actively watch for possible dps improvements in your environment.  And by your environment I actually mean a lot of things.  I mean watching the way other hunters and other dps perform in raids.  I mean talking to these people too.  I mean watching yourself play the game, within and beyond the screen.  But I also mean things outside your personal gaming experience.  You should be online looking at a variety of media, possibly including reading hunter blogs and forums, watching videos from other guilds, listening to podcasts, studying boss fights and reading the latest patch notes.  Generally, you should observe from all angles.  Have an eye to any avenue you think could lead to you bettering your gameplay in a specific or general sense.  This of course requires an investment of time and some diligence; but you’re already playing WoW, so I’m taking it for granted that you have some free time.

experiment: This takes keeping an open mind and observing a step further.  It is more calculated, more systematic, more scientific and more proactive.  Instead of waiting for things to happen to him or her, the rigorous hunter finds possible dps improvements and then tests hypotheses about these possible changes.  This can mean using a dps simulator or a training dummy to compare possible specs.  It can mean trying one thing one boss attempt and a second thing on another attempt (all the while secretly hoping everything else remains the same for testing purposes).  Always do your best to make sure your experiments are valid, though; you need to understand your tests well enough to understand what (if anything) they are actually saying about your dps.  And good experimentation often requires a bit of creativity.  Using a good test can mean devising that test yourself if you are indeed trying out something new.

be willing to make sacrifices: Once you have studied your world and run your experiments, you have to go where the data leads you, wherever that may be.  That will entail not bringing your cool blue and white gorilla to raids because you now know that wolves do the job better.  Optimal dps leaves no room for the spec you leveled up with or your partiality to bows over crossbows.  Being willing to make sacrifices is not just a matter of sentimentality, though; it is also economic.  It means ignoring sunk costs and readily accommodating new costs.  You have to be prepared to get little mileage out of that 400g worth of weapon enchants because you happen get a new two-hander the next day (which you then have to enchant also).  You have to be prepared to ditch that spider you spent so much time leveling because you mistakenly thought Roar of Recovery would make a spider worth raiding with. Some people used to ignore sunk costs (of time) to the extent that they would reroll their entire characters (Orc racials are supposed to be the best for hunter dps).  I don’t think you need to go to the extreme of a race or faction change, but you should be willing to re-gear, re-gem, re-enchant, re-spec, re-tame, re-UI (these’s re’s are making less sense grammatically as I go along), etc., whenever you have to for better dps.

seek and act on gains even if they are marginal:  This principle goes as a partner to be willing to make sacrifices partly because it will require you to make a lot of them.  Its lesson is, don’t ignore a potential means of improvement just because it may offer only a small increase in dps.  As discussed above, the little things do add up.  Sure, the one change may only bring you up 20 dps with full raid buffs.  But if you do that with five things, that’s one hundred dps.  It may even be more because I am mainly using add up as a catch-all phrase.  Consider that by stacking something like Call of the Wild or Black Arrow with other cooldowns, you aren’t just adding something onto those buffs, you are increasing them multiplicatively.  If you are wondering why you are sitting at 5k while another hunter with similar gear and spec is at 6k, it is probably because the other hunter spent time figuring out or learning about little improvements and when added together they made for 1k extra dps.  That has been my experience, at least.

keep things simple: This may not seem to fit in with what I’ve said so far.  After all, I’ve just given you the impossible task of watching and testing everything.  What I mean is, keep things simple so as to make watching and testing (and playing the game) easier. Don’t take a step down in rigor, but do what you can to make it easier on yourself and take time to evaluate what is helpful and/or necessary as opposed to what only appears to be those things.  Do you really need Mik’s Scrolling Battle Text flaring numbers all over your screen? Is there an easier, more intuitive way to track your dot(s)?  What test presents the clearest picture of what you are interested in?  Do you need that many keybindings and action bars when raiding?  These questions go on and I’m sure you get my idea.

trust well: This is almost required by the demands of the preceding principles.   Ideally, you would be testing everything out yourself, but that simply isn’t possible.  Since trusting others on pieces of information is necessary more often than not, trusting well is a good skill.  Do your best to make sure the source is reliable.  Don’t take hearsay as law.  Try to find other sources that confirm the piece of information.  Ask questions and scrutinize as much as possible so long as the game is still fun to play (and so long as you aren’t being a jerk ).  Being scientific is one thing, but no one likes the person who is always getting in trivial disagreements with other raid members and wasting the raid’s time.

collaborate and share: There are visionary, path-breaking geniuses out there, but most of us aren’t them.  Good work for the rest of us comes from bouncing our ideas off other people, asking questions of them, and actually using their feedback.  And you should be willing to give feedback and help, too.  Collaboration should happen in game, too.  You should have an ongoing conversation with your guild’s other hunters about huntering.  A healthy competition on dps doesn’t hurt either!

Is a good mindset of self-improvement as described here necessary to raid?  No, you can raid without analyzing everything.  Is such a mindset necessary to do adequate dps?  No, you can be adequate without these principles.

The thing is, though, a good mindset helps with raiding.  It helps with dps.  That’s why I took the time to describe it here.  How much of it you adopt is up to you.

- Eidotrope

My hubby is a hunter.  He recently returned from a week out in the woods, hunting deer.  It may seem odd to some people that a vegetarian/animal lover would marry a hunter, but for me, it all comes down to mutual respect.

The way I see it, hubby has been hunting for years.  It’s an activity he enjoyed long before we ever met.  His experiences as a hunter helped to shape him into the man he is today… just as activities I enjoy have helped to shape me as a person.  He gives me space for my activities, and I do the same for him.

Also, I’m tolerant of him hunting because he does recognize how I feel about it and isn’t a jerk about it.  He respects my feelings and views about it, even though they don’t mesh with his.  This didn’t happen overnight though.  In the beginning of our relationship, some experiences were trying…. like, the time he asked me to go to the outlet mall with him.  That mall is a 90-minute drive.  Hubby waited till we were about 20 minutes from the mall to inform me that the main reason we were going to the mall was because there was a gun show across the street that he wanted to attend too.  Quickly miffed about this lack of information, I tried to make the best of the situation and attended the gun show with him… but I wasn’t inside for long.  Seeing pro-hunting propaganda like bumper stickers touting “Vegetarian is an old Indian word for lousy hunter,” along with animal skins hanging among the displays just escalated the frustration I was feeling and made the situation go from bad to worse.  I left and waited outside for him to finish with the show.  I know he felt bad because he purchased a book about cats for me before he left the show.  That event was a turning point for us, I think.  I wasn’t truly upset about the bumper stickers or animal skins… I was upset at what seemed like him being insensitive in not telling me that we were going to participate in an activity that might not mesh with my beliefs.  We both learned something that day and we’ve moved forward ever since.

Before he left for hunting, I made it known that I wouldn’t be thrilled if he pulled up in the driveway with a deer carcass on his car.  He said to me, “Honey, you know how I feel about putting bumper stickers on my car… you really think I’m going to tie a dead animal to it?”  He promised to get the deer processed before coming home if he shot one.  And he held true to that.  He didn’t shoot a deer, but he also told me that as the week progressed, and the likelihood of getting the deer processed before coming home decreased, he decided he wasn’t going to take a shot if he saw one.  When he told me that, I honestly had mixed feelings.  I was happy that he was taking my feelings into consideration but at the same time, I felt bad that my beliefs were interfering with his hobby.

One thing I’ve realized about hubby though, and he’s said this about himself, is that he doesn’t hunt solely for a prize.  He hunts mostly for the overall experience of having time off work, being out in the woods, spending time with his father and anyone else who may go along, seeing other wildlife like a black bear while in his blind, etc.  He said he truly didn’t care that he didn’t get a deer… and I believe him.

Does anyone else have similar experiences to share?  Are you a vegetarian with hunters in your family?  Would being a hunter be a dealbreaker?  I’m interested in hearing your thoughts!!!

If you have any love for hunters, you’ll go watch the music video for Frostheim’s Hunter Song.

We finally managed to finish the hard mode on Flame Leviathan. Our last attempt was pretty fruitless, particularly because we were carrying a couple undergeared folks so they could … well, gear up on the bosses instead of grinding emblems all day. We had our A-team this time, and managed to down it after 3 or so attempts being foiled by RNG — our primary launcher would land in a Hodir beam or something similar to that. Barring him dying, the fight was a breeze.

We rolled over and downed Hardmode XT in hopes of picking up some loot for our melee DPS, but another Magnetized Projectile Emitter dropped instead. We are now 3/3 for the Emitter dropping as we down XT (at least, the ones I’ve been to), and since I already have two of these guns (hey, nothing wrong with keeping an extra potential PvP gun just in case), we sharded it.

We downed Hardmode Iron Council again — I believe we will at the least be running Ulduar each week to get a Archivum Data Disc for all of our essential core raid group. Hopefully we’ll be able to finish off the rest of the Hardmodes (and down Algalon) in good time before we get swamped with Icecrown in 3.3.

We decided to jump to the Argent Grounds and try out 10 ToGC again. Our last attempt failed horribly, and we couldn’t seem to put out enough DPS to down the boss before the worms came. We changed our strategy a bit (half of our DPS is melee, so having Snobold-ed members humping Gormok’s hind legs worked like a charm) and used Levitate as a secondary “You are on fire please move” trigger.

The worms fight was much, much messier. After the first burrow, our OT (Arcblight), ended up with a Toxin 9 seconds before a Bile was up on anybody. We could’ve saved him, but the window was pretty slim, and we ended up missing it. He died with the worm at less than 3%, so we managed to kill it in good time — but not before it ended up killing one of our three healers, our favorite Quiescence.

The rest of the encounter was filled with complete epic, clutch awesomeness. On the Icehowl fight, we ended up doing a majority of the fight with our MT (Ahlen), the DPS, and a single healing Paladin, Nekomode.

At 500K HP, Icehowl had the following timers according to DBM:

Enrage: 10 seconds

Massive Crash: 7 seconds

That was a 3 second window. If he had enraged before massive crash, he would have wiped the raid. Instead, he crashed just prior to enraging, giving us the few seconds we needed to finish him off while he was stunned against the wall.

We also managed to down Jaraxxus on our first shot. It was rather surprising to all of us, but the fight didn’t seem nearly as difficult or complicated as the first one. In fact, the most irritating part of the encounter for us, the Infernals, felt easier since we would pop the Volcano before the Infernals really became a problem. The chain lightnings were getting us a lot, though. We’ll probably have to work better at positioning our healers so that everyone can be spread out but still be in range for Incinerate Flesh.

A fun night. Even moreso because I managed to catch it all on FRAPS!

So I write, and I WOW, why not combine the two….

This is what I do, I hunter.  My main is a lvl 80 Night Elf Hunter named Belnok on the Blackwater Raiders realm.  Bel was my first toon and we’ve come a long way.  Bel is just now ready for Uld10 and with my guild’s current merger with a more end-game oriented guild (my guild= The Secret Lotus, end-game guild = Ascension Asylum), clearing Uld10 and quickly progressing to ToC10 should be within a two-four week window.  More of that to come….

My other toons are a DK that I love to tank with named Aveah, and a preist that I love to heal with named Exye.  I have several other toons on this realm, including several others on various other realms; Blackwater is my home right now tho.

Anywho, do stay tuned as I love to research the various aspects of tanks deeps and heals, and will update accordingly.  The blog will go from end game to leveling in the starter areas, as we all know that new people are obviously buying the game today, and starting out fumbling around with what does ‘lfm 4 h toc’ actually mean, and what are mobs again?

A word, if you do come to like my writing and insight by way of reasearch and testing (I do plan to be in the PTR), I am welcoming all and any help I can get with regards to making movies and things along the lines of making the blog more interactive.  Discussing the mechanics of a class or that class’s perspective of a given fight are great, but seeing it is another, often tastier animal.  So thank you in advance.

peace

Bel

"Ain't natural."

“Right, lad, I hear what yer sayin’.  It’s a nice bow, ain’t denyin’ it.  I know it’s better’n me old gun.  But it’s a bow, lad.  Dwarves, we don’t use ‘ese here things, aye?  Bent sticks’o'wood w’strings onna back, ‘em’s fer poncy elves prancin’ round th’forest.  A dwarf needs th’ feel o’a boomstick in ‘is hand, boy.  ‘Sides, last time I tried t’go on campaign w’a bow, ’bout damn threw m’shoulder outta joint fer a week.”

(EDIT AFTER THE FACT):  OK, the quick story behind this, and why Beltar is the Wildfire Riders’ resident loot trashcan extraordinaire.  While on last night, the call went out for a ranged DPS to help in Ulduar because Yva’s connection crapped itself and she couldn’t get back on.  So I volunteered.  Despite his somewhat marginal gear compared to the rest of the 10-man, we got Hodir hardmode…and he got a nice cloak when the guy who won the roll saw that Beltar was still wearing a blue Cloak of Holy Extermination.  (Vent:  “BELTAR, GODDAMMIT, YOU ARE TAKING THIS CLOAK NOW.”)  Then we cleared Vezax trash…and the Golemheart Longbow dropped.  At that point, Yva got back on and I headed back out so she could take her spot back and they went on to get hardmode Vezax.

My last guide to the twins was effective, but is due for a bit of an overhaul. Mainly because it fails to address a very important hunter-specific strategy. Before I continue, go read it because I won’t be going over the basics of the fight, and will assume you know the mechanics already (in terms of orbs, auras, switching targets, penalties for screwing up, etc).

A huge factor in the success of this encounter is going to be in execution. I understated the difficulty last time because I was spoiled by being in a large competent guild. The fight actually presents significant challenges if you have new players (and/or undergeared players) in your raid. If you are riding the thin line of just enough DPS to get their shield down before it heals them back up, then you need to have that much better execution.

The most commonly used strategy for this fight is generally to split the raid in half and have each half fight each boss. As DPS, we want to collect as many orbs of our color as possible, and avoid collecting orbs of the wrong color. As hunters, we have the ability to DPS the boss from just about anywhere in the room. Thus, we have an opportunity to increase our raid’s DPS by altering our positioning.

If you’re, for example, assigned to get a light aura and attack Darkbane, instead of standing with all the other light essence players, you can stand at max range between the dark aura players and the wall, and carefully pick out the light orbs that spawn on that part of the room. This prevents people in that group from having to move to avoid light essences, as well as lets you do more DPS.

The skill of moving as little as possible and picking up as few of the wrong orbs as possible is not easy, however it comes with practice. The advantages are well worth it though. You increase your DPS, and increase the DPS of the people with the opposite color orbs, as well as reduce the raid healing required.

The above image (click for zoom) shows what I’m talking about. The big rectangles are where most of the light and dark players will be standing, the circles are the vortexes that you use to change color, the rectangles are where the bosses are tanked, and the orbs spawn along the wall. The orbs will average out to about evenly dark and light, but when they make their way into the DPS, they can wreak havoc.

Now this is actually a variation of the commonly used strategy for hard mode- in hard mode, however, hunters only collect orbs. They often have a special set of gear they use for it (typically with a lot of stam). This isn’t a hard mode guide, I’m simply taking the idea of a soaker and applying it in such a way that it doesn’t cost the raid DPS.

One problem with this is that when you need to change colors, if you are going to be standing on the top or bottom of this map (and not in the back), you will have a long distance to cover. You need to get good at disengaging for aura swapping, as well as changing your target quickly. As Kripparrian, a recent guest on the hunting party podcast, suggested, the easiest way to disengage is to jump in the direction you want to go, do a quick about-face in the air with your mouse, and then fire disengage. Practice this. It lets you aim your disengage, as well as gives you a couple extra feet of distance.

If you have any questions or criticisms, don’t be shy! Comments are appreciated

공짜최고!

A quick hour and a half had our guild clearing out the quick instance encounter raids of 10 VoA, Onyxia and ToC. Not much to be said about Vault, as nothing dropped that was relevant to our group.

Onyxia was a bit more generous; our MT, Ahlen, was finally able to grab his Quel’Serrar to replace the Heroic ToC-5 sword, which should be good — though I don’t know enough about tanking to really comment.

And I haven’t checked any blogs, forums or websites today, and I’m sure this has already been mentioned to death, but…
Yeah. Onyxia pets from the WoW anniversary trigger DBM. I’m just glad that the pets didn’t decide to fire those off during the fight. That would’ve been interesting. But unless this gets fixed, or until this gets fixed, I foresee a lot of 50 DKP minus… well, if Onyxia is even on a progression fight in a non-PUG. Which it never is.ToC was also nice to our tanks, though the fights were pretty sloppy. We ended up with a total of 3 crash bungles on Icehowl in a single fight, wiping us at 250K. That was not fun. Nor was one of our DKs killing half the raid with Path of Frost right before Anub’arak.

Most importantly, though, is that I managed to save a trinket from being sharded and add it to my collection of tanky-trinkets. I still don’t have my Black Heart yet, but I’ll get it eventually.
I did, however, manage to grab a Banner of Victory this morning. I don’t need it as SV per-se, but I’ve been considering MM for a few select fights and having the gear options availableis always a welcome idea in my mind.

I’ll close with some ego-stroking; an awesome tank complimented my hunter-ing skills in a chain heroic group today. Apparently I really eased the burden on pulls and babysitting the healer. Hopefully I can keep it up and not get lazy or sloppy.

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