It's 5 o'clock somewhere...

... and that somewhere is here, incidentally.  Actually it's 20 after.... And here I am, still waiting on Blizzard to get their shit together and let us play again.

I understand they have a job, and being the real world shit happens, but damn if it isn't frustrating.

BRRRAAAAAIIIINNSssss....

My head, it is empty of ideas at the moment and I feel a zombie-like need to devour someone else's.

That's ok, it's usually about this empty, and I'm sure something will will shake loose from the cobwebs up there soon.

Meanwhile, in the real world (*gasp*! rl? inorite?), the Colts lost to the Saints in the Super Bowl, and those of us that follow both our own religion and that of football have about 6 months of wailing and gnashing of teeth before the new season starts again.  Congrats to the Saints and the City of New Orleans - now if you could just stop building things below sea level I'd feel a lot better about your mental status.

I kid, I kid.  It was a good game and I really thought it was going into overtime before Peyton Manning threw that ill-fated pass.  Such is life!

Also of note in the real world, within the next 13 days I have the following events for which I must do something that resembles being socially acceptable, in no particular order:  Valentine's Day, my birthday, my sister-in-law's birthday, and my 1-year wedding anniversary.  And my first baby is due in just under 6 weeks.  I suppose that's what I get for going and finding a great woman to marry, but if I randomly disappear here in awhile, you can probably guess what happened.

Back here in the fabricated reality of the blogging world (I refuse to call it the blogosphere), things churn along as they always do.  My reading list has grown so large so fast, that I felt it would be overly burdensone to continue expanding the widget (or gadget, depending on your terminology) over there to the right.  It already consumes more space than I'd like it to.  Sometime in the (not exceptionally distant) future, I hope to have a working gadget which will display, for example, the 5 most recently updated blogs from my whole list, and a link to the entire blogroll.  Maybe I'm just throwing a pipe dream out there, and maybe I'll get a picture up there in my profile someday too.  If nothing else I should be able to provide a page with the blogroll.  I just have to be the little engine blogger that could. "I think I can I think I can..."

Kaethir out.

Tankalicious

If you haven't seen it already...

What has Bell over at 4Haelz done?

Chumpavon the Ice Failure

Am I the only one disappointed with the Toravon fight... and, well, most of what Blizzard has done lately?

Wintergrasp belonged to the Horde when I logged in Tuesday, with an hour to spare before the Alliance's next chance to take control, so I went ahead with a random dungeon, pulled Nexus and finally got the Chaos Theory achievement on Anomalus... and I was disappointed with it, because it wasn't hard in the slightest. Not since he only opened one rift to shield himself. Blizzard's round of nerfs have saddened me, and that's the first one I've dealt with. Respect Your Elders is probably going to be a cakewalk as well when I get to it. GRRR. At least the two Gun'Drak achievements I have left still pose a challenge... or at least one of them might.  The fact that they are trying to lessen some of the annoyance of certain encounters is laudable, but when it cheapens the Heroic achievements, it's more annoying to me than the rest of it was to begin with.

When Wintergrasp finally rolled around I queued up and ported in to some horrendous lag - 2-3 seconds - because the new boss being released meant EVERYBODY wanted to capture - or defend - the keep.  As per my usual trend when attacking, I went to the southern towers to try to defend the siege workshops and the towers themselves.  Unfortunately, I was just about the only player to do so until it was too late to really matter.

Fortunately, that meant we were having success at the Keep.  By the time the third tower fell, we had broken through the outer wall in two places and were working on the inner wall in two places.  The timer drop for the towers falling meant that when we finally massed enough of an army to break through, there was only about 1:40 left on the clock.  Then, when we broke down the door, there was about :40 left on the clock.  I (among others) frantically clicked at the orb in the center of the keep, while lag kept me from doing anything significant, but with about :15 seconds left, the server declared that the Alliance had captured Wintergrasp.


I signed up for a 10-man run, not knowing if our guild 25-man run the next day was going to hit VoA or not.  Both myself and a paladin had 2 possible roles - tank and heals for me, tank and dps for him - and both of us got asked to do the role for which we were less well-geared (healing for me, and tanking for him) due to the group makeup.  We proceeded in, skipped everything up to Toravon, and pretty much the following strategy was laid out:

"Ranged, kill the frozen orbs and everybody else kill the boss."

... and that's really all it took.  Admittedly, the average gear of the group was a bit high, but when that's all the strategy that is needed to kill a boss in a pug without wiping (or even having a single death) ON THE FIRST DAY THE BOSS IS RELEASED, Blizzard hasn't made it hard enough.

VoA has been a loot pinata from the beginning, and now it's even more of one.  IT'S A JOKE!  I like easy loot but for crying out loud at least pretend that you designed a challenging encounter!

Ok, I'll get down off my soapbox now.