Ain't No Cure For The Summertime Blues

It must be summer, because CD's sufferring another membership crisis.

A bunch of our raiders have decided to go to another group. Others are giving up the game and some have just decided to go afk for two months.

This is nothing new, but I'm reminded of the old saying about the broom: change the head and handle enough times and it's not the same broom anymore. CD isn't the group of friends people imagine it to be. It's a tapestry of cliques held together by the promise of raid content. When that fails, they go elsewhere/

It'll probably be late July/early August at the earliest before we're able to field a 25-man again, assuming we get some promising candidates. And if Blizzard actually manage to get WotLK out in October/November then it'll effectively kill interest in raiding for a lot of folks. No point in working on it when it won't matter in three months.

At the moment it's taking me all my willpower just to log on and scrape together a group for ZA or Karazhan. I'm increasingly tempted to stop playing until WotLK. At least then I won't have to worry about getting 25 bodies together for a progression raid.

Look before you post

Well, I answered the a few posts in the Gear Check/Advice thread over at Maintankadin until the bile rose in my throat and a red mist descended over my eyes.

In the year I've been reading Maintankadin, the knowledge base has increased remarkably, with guides on gear progression, uncrushability and even gems and enchantments. Almost every silly, needy question has been answered there and the one that hasn't; "what level of gear do I need to tank x" has been answered over at Tankspot. These guides will answer 90% of the questions people seem to ask, with the rest being generic "rate my gear" threads which whilst banal are kinda acceptable.

Perhaps it's just me, but if I'm looking for information on uncrushability, I would immediately head for the big thread marked "Uncrushability Guide" rather than write a post saying "hay guyz, how iz I crushed?".

I suppose I shouldn't be too harsh. I can remember the bleak days before I discovered Maintankadin, and I was as lost and dazed as any of them when I first joined up. There is a lot of information to be assimilated and not everyone has the inclination to do so. Also, since most guilds and raidgroups will only have one or two Tankadins in them, it's hard to turn to someone in-game for informed advice or reassurance.

That said, it would be nice if people who see someone with the same problem as them would just read how they solved it, or comment there, rather than just throw out an extremely open-ended "rate my gear" thread. Specifics are your friends.

The Great Threat Sweat pt 2.

CD's still in a raiding slump atm. Ulu's tanked Zul'Aman, Karazhan and a few Heroics, but getting 25 people together seems to be impossible right now. I can't wait until WotLK where any instance can be switched between 10 and 25-man.

So, I managed to get Ulu's Shattrath Protectorate Breastplate at the weekend. I socketed it with a Glowing Shadowsong Amethyst, and then procceded to go apesh*t and put further Amethysts into his Belt of the Guardian and Crystalforged Shoulderguards.

In his threat set, Ulu has now gained about 50 spelldamage and 35 spellhit at the expense of around 300 health. Not an amazing trade-off, but every little helps when you're trying to keep up with a T6 Druid. In his main tanking set, he's lost about 150 health (leaving him at 16.2k), but gained 30 spelldamage, which feels ok. Of course now CD just has to get back into the swing of raiding so I can try this set-up on something more challenging than Kara/Zul'Aman.

Well, added to the general summer malaise and the encroachment of Age of Conan on a WoW-weary CD, we now have Euro '08 (a football tournament for those of you outside Europe) to compete with. It's getting to the point where I wonder why I bother signing in to WoW atm. So to keep me amused, i've been playing through some single player RPGs which I failed to complete before WoW's inexorable gravity sucked me back in.

I've also decided to take the plunge and set up an auxillary blog for my non-WoW-related stuff, be it music, films or other games. It can be found over at walstafa.blogspot.com.

The Great Threat Sweat

Haven't updated this thing recently, but then I haven't had much to update.

I've been working my way through a lot of the single-player games that I've bought, started and then gave up on and went back to WoW. I'm not playing Age of Conan much anymore. After the initial burst of excitement, I just feel I've lost momentum with it.

I'm also not playing WoW much outside of raids and the occasional burst of dailies when my warchest runs low. I did run my first Karazhan for a while on Saturday, since I've decided to invest in the Shattrath Protectorate's Breastplate.

I initally resisted the chest, since it meant a substantial drop in Ulu's health and avoidance. However, with CD's increasingly overgeared DPS, not to mention the fully T6-geared Feral Druid we have tagging along with us, I've been feeling the pinch in the threat department. Gone are the days when Omen used to show me with a proud lead on the DPS, and on a Void Reaver kill last week, the aforementioned Druid managed to steal aggro from me in the first five secs, after an Avenger's Shield/ Judgement of Righteousness combo.

Whilst I can claim "well she massively outgears me", it's not really a good enough argument. She's fully T6, but after looking at what Ulu's threat stats would be in full T6, they're not significantly better than his threat gear is atm. It looks like after ages of trying to get decent avoidance and effective health gear, I'm having to look at my threat seriously for the first time. It's a challenge to be sure.

I has new UI!

Well Age of Conan's starting to lose it's luster for me. I'm starting to find that underneath the few differences I like is a lot of stuff that annoys me about it. Aretus is in the 20-40 grind right now, which seems to be the most tedious part. I'd probably get through it if I spent a week grinding, but when I'm looking for a fix of fun outside of raiding, then AoC doesn't seem to be giving me it. Guess I'm too caught in the Wow mindset.

In other news, I've been annoyed with my UI in WoW for a while now and I've been looking at ways to improve it. Been inspired by Baelor's recent efforts in that field to rebuild my UI from the ground up. This was the end result:





Feels fairly clean now.