Thanks to the efforts of Elsen, the members of Jane Doe and the denizens of Open Raid I now make awesome awesome bubbles.
Hammer Time
January 10th, 2013 § 0 comments § permalink
My Christmas Project – Part Deux
January 6th, 2013 § 1 comment § permalink
As detailed in my last post my World of Warcraft project for this Christmas break was to get my bank alt Gnome to level 80 for a Herald of the Titans run that’ll be happening sometime later this year.
Unfortunately I did not commit the necessary time to the project to get it done. I did however get him 13 more levels up to a nice 53. About halfway through I was informed that I really should have him in a guild with all the leveling perks and was hindering things by keeping him in my banking guild ‘The Royal Bank of Grokk’.
A quick switcheroo later and I’m now soaking up the perks. What a nub.
My Christmas Project
December 21st, 2012 § 3 comments § permalink
My 2012 Christmas Project is to level my 40-ish bank alt Grokknome. The tricksy little Gnome Rogue must be level 80 by the end of the break so I can take him into Ulduar and get a Herald of the Ancients achievement at some point next year. Failure on this point will result in not getting said achievement – this is bad.
There. Since it’s now written down it has to happen.
Mists of Pandaria beta
May 9th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink
I was fortunate enough to get on the Cataclysm Beta. If you scroll down enough you’ll see my huge screenshot gallery and possibly a few thoughts on it. It was a fantastic experience but I’m not going to repeat it.
Because Spoilers.
Since I purchased the Annual pass I was guaranteed a spot on the MoP beta. This excited me back last year when I signed up but as time passed I’ve decided that no, I don’t want to know what a Panda is like, that no, I don’t want a Monk just yet and that no, I really don’t want to know how they’ve changed the Holy Paladin’s play style/role/armour/beard
So sorry for a lack of screen shots. You’ll have to make do with the one above.
Raid Leading for Beginners
March 12th, 2012 § 1 comment § permalink
The other day I was asked by a new raid leader in the guild if there were any tips I could give him. I was in the middle of running a raid myself at this point and I’m fairly certain that whatever I replied with wasn’t all that useful. It was probably barely more then a string of non-sensical letters and yet he said his thanks and carried on.
It occurs to me now that there are number of things I should have known when I started raid leading and that if I’d spent less time trying to figure these out and more time actually leading the team I was with would likely have made quite a lot more progress then it ended up doing. I have written about the most salient points but there are so many different ways to approach raid leading that there are many I won’t have covered. All of them are a vital part of any leaders armoury and learning them is as much a part of your journey as your teams progression is.
Dealing with ‘that’ raider.
January 24th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink
I’m sure we have all had experience of ‘that’ raider. They seem to come in an almost infinite number of flavours but the end result is always the same — a disruption to the team. Perhaps your version of ‘that’ raider does not ever stop talking, perhaps they do not ever start talking, perhaps (and this is probably a little more common) they talk just enough to offend, antagonise or generally upset the teams delicate emotional balance.
New expansion? Cue the nay-sayers.
October 22nd, 2011 § 1 comment § permalink
I’ve not been playing this game all that long when compared to others—just a scant 2 years all told—so I still find that there is a lot of fun to be had in it’s various aspects. I appreciate that having played it for longer some may feel a little more jaded by expansions that don’t quite meet their expectations but I well and truly don’t understand comments like these:
Prodding for progress.
September 15th, 2011 § 1 comment § permalink
It occurred to me at some point last week that I hadn’t taken a good look at my teams character maintenance efforts in a long long time. I remember, back when I first started the whole raid leading malarky, that it used to be a fairly prominent part of what I did.
Back then the task entailed looking at be.imba.hu or wow-heroes.com for each of the people in my team and then cajoling them into actually following the advice. They’d get bonus points if they went off someplace else and did some of their own research but that was a very rare thing indeed—pretty much all were content to just follow the instructions and be on their merry way. Beating on internet dragons is the aim of the game here, not the meta-game that is theory-crafting.
Finagling Google Chrome to be a bit more Lion-y
July 23rd, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink
Figuring that I’d not written much up here lately I thought I’d better do something—anything—and so I write about making Google Chrome fit in a little better with the newly released OSX Lion.
Big guilds, little people
April 27th, 2011 § 3 comments § permalink
How big is your guild? Do you know everyone in it? Do you make an effort to really know everyone in it? Or are you content to surround yourself in the people you know and ignore the other 200?
Just this discussion came up the other day amongst my guild-mates and I and I genuinely think that it needs some serious thought if a large guild is to be successful. It is a natural human trait to form a small group of people around you whom you really know well—you might consider these your best friends. Sure, you will have other friends, beyond that acquaintances and everyone is different; one person may maintain a very small circle of close friends where others will have much larger groups. At some point though the guild grows beyond the size of even the socialites largest circle and that, in my opinion, is when issues arise.
