Lazy Sunday reading

Cheek Magazine, issue 5Still no word on Shaman Tier 10 armor aside from names. If it doesn’t happen soon, I’m worried that Lodur will explode. The names, oddly, are all variants on Frost Witch. Garb / Regalia / Battlegear — maybe this time they’ll keep straight which applies to what spec. Frost Witch is a strangely emasculating choice for male shamans.

Our good friend Aurik is not just back, he’s found that he is enjoying the game again.

Everyone is talking about the new boss monitoring addon Deus Vox Encounters, or DXE. Check out posts from Matticus, Drug, and Windsoar.

Allison Robert from Wow.com had a fascinating post examining what it is to heal battlegrounds as a Resto Druid. I still feel stung by their incredible dominance in Burning Crusade days. Apparently things are very different now.

Rhidach on Righteous Defense responds to the upcoming Paladin nerfs by making a request for stances to address the not infrequent problems that crop up in Paladins (and Shamans occasionally too) where the wrong spec is best at healing a particular encounter. His proposal is much like mine to create tanking and DPS auras for guiding your focus.

Scattershot thoughts

An unfederated collection of thoughts tonight…

I hate to admit it, but I’m looking forward to the new cross-realm LFG system. I know this means I’m looking forward to pugging. And that pugging was invented in the pits of hell to convince the damned that salvation does not exist. I’m looking forward to it all the same.

For some reason, I keep playing the auction house. There’s nothing I want to spend money on, but I keep bankrolling it all the same. I have no explanation for this behavior.

I’m going to start back up on HealingDummy. Now that HoTs tick, it should be pretty easy to get it into the final stretch. Are there other addons y’all were hoping to see?

Everybody and their grandmother was talking about the Hunting Lodge Podcast yesterday. Brigwyn and Daewin have a good thing going there. All told, it was a day full of WoW podcasts. The Elitists, WoW Insider show, Hunting Lodge and the Twisted Nether Blogcast. Do you people all aim at maintenance Tuesdays for your releases?

For anyone missing Tristan’s Thunderstruck this weekend, as I am, he aintn’t dead. Swamped by school last week, but he should be back this week. He’s looking for a permanent co-host for The Elitists Podcasts. Anyone out there with a love of their own voice and a flair for all things Blizzard, look him up. (I have to fix my microphone. Not that I qualify. I don’t know the first thing about Starcraft or Diablo. You click in those games, right? Like, a lot?)

Curse Client v4 is in open beta. I never did a followup post about it, but WoW Interface’s MMOUI Minion is stable enough for general use now as well.

Stoney on Big Hit Box puts to rest any question of upgrading to a fast weapon for Enhancement builds. I picked up an Icefall Blade one night when literally no one else would take it. I tried plugging it into EnhSim to see how it would work out. It was a disaster. Vendor-bait now.

And they’re dropping the cooldowns on our Fire and Earth Elemental Totems to 10 minutes. That’s fun.

Lazy Sunday reading

I liked having the afternoon off last Sunday I’ve decided to make it a regular thing. Here are links to some of the things that have provoked me or kept me entertained this week. Oh, and I put in a new threaded discussion widget, linked out of the header panel. Anyone is free to create or reply. Try it out; let me know what you think.

Rohan at Blessing of Kings asks Is spell haste bad for the game? I tend to think that it is. I was thrilled to see someone out there who didn’t just agree, but came up with a series of solid arguments why.

Have you seen the outrage over the GearScore addon recently? People are getting downright angry about exclusionary group building tactics. “LF Healer H-AK, iLvl 245 only plz.” I’m on the fence about that. I mean, if that guy doesn’t want to run with good players’ alts, that’s fine. Why would you want to run with him anyway? I don’t think the yelling was as loud as it is now, though. I’m guessing that has to do with the upcoming LFG tool. But before that comes, Karatheya of Cold Comfort has an alternative player evaluation tool.

In the last year, the gang at RockPaperShotgun have turned that site into my favorite general video game resource. Two articles have jumped out at me recently. First, if there are any budding game makers out there, the Unity 3d engine has gone free for indie games. There’s some remarkable stuff out there built in Unity, including the remarkable PuzzleBloom. And then, they introduced me to Small World — the finest browser-based game I have ever played.

Miss Medicina’s healer survey is blowing up huge! There’s no stopping this thing. Eventually it will paper all of us. Rather like the great zombie plague of ‘08.

Azeroth United’s Child’s Play charity work is getting into high gear with the year end approaching. This one is talking about something called a Twibbon, which I’m sure cooler people than me knew about long before that article. And Sideshow & Syrana have come up with a way to both dodge blame and help sick kids in a single shot. They’re asking for whatever help people can give, which can come in as small a flavor as tweeting about it. Or, chip in directly with the widget below.

Happenings around the web

Shatner. Um, it’s related. He claimed to be a Shaman once. In an ad…

A quiet Sunday morning begs to be followed by a yawning, lazy afternoon. Hence, a cheapie links post. Enjoy.

First, I’d like to point your attention to Tristan’s renewed series of hard mode boss strategies, annotated with kill videos. Posts are up about Freya with all 3 elders and Mimiron’s Firefighter. And if you aren’t already, you should be listening to his podcast. Nowhere else on iTunes will you find Matticus’ mom freaking out.

Friend of the blog and frequent commenter Windsoar has opened up a blog and really hit the ground running. Jaded Alt, as you might infer from the name, covers a lot of ground. Favorite post: A personal view of what it’s like to go from Horde to Alliance. Some unexpected wrinkles in there, particularly for a former Blood Elf Paladin tank.

Another commenter, Charles, makes good with Planet of the Hats, featuring some surprisingly strong Elemental Shaman coverage. My favorite post talks about his Power Auras setup because it’s entirely different from my own, and therefore rich with ideas to steal.

While I was attempting (and failing) to get my fellow healbloggers to post about why they heal, the sphere instead picked up the gauntlet thrown down by Don’t be that Shaman. Followups include a Matticus-penned post on WoW.com titled Don’t be that Priest. Shortly thereafter, not 1 but 2 Holy Paladin variants went up; HolyPaladin.net beat Horde Review by 2 days. If there are others out there I’ve missed, fill them in the comments.

Matthew Rossi on WoW.com summarizes the (dubious) current state of Enhancement tanking. I was hugely excited when I saw the headline. The article disenchanted me, however. The key tools that were once available no longer are. Those attempting Enhancement tank builds now are fighting an uphill struggle. I’d love to try my hand at tanking, but I am not willing to subvert the designers’ intentions to do it. They have shown a long history of striking out at such unintentional consequences.

I updated GridStatusChainWho to fix the Debugging and Enabled switches. While I was at it, I added experimental support detecting Holy Nova and Circle of Healing, but am unable to test this out myself. If any Priests can try it out, I’d love to hear back. After several false starts, the addon is now available on Curse as well as WoWInterface.

NameScore: What a fun new toy

Here’s a fun thing. NameScore promises to objectively evaluate the one constant handle we have on another player — their name — so that we can judge them. It’s probably a character flaw on my part that I prefer to run with players who take their names seriously. I figure it implies they also take the game seriously.

I gritted my teeth through having characters Birthrot and Mikehunt in an old guild of mine. I drew the line at names I couldn’t easily type, though. Dôrå The Explorer was probably cute when you typed it, but it implies a certain lack of respect for the game.

If I were to start up a new guild now, I could skip all the usual formalities of the applicant procedure. Who cares how much you’ve raided before, or what your UI looks like, or what quality of gems you have socketed? Now I could just install this addon and tell applicants, your name must rate at least a B before you can join.

Non-traditional characters are a key source of negative points.

Gam3r speak is also bad for your score.

Naming yourself after your class, race, or an ability seems to count against you.

Sadly, the system can still be gamed.