Mountain Dew and Blizzard are teaming up in the MountainDewGameFuel.com challenge. By watching videos, referring friends, and all kinds of other silliness, you earn tokens which you can use later to buy stuff.
I normally don’t got for promotional crap like this, but apparently you’ll be able to get one of the new Battle Bots in-game pets. Oh yeah. 75 pets here I come!
Click my banner so I get more points. :)
Funny how you take a break from blogging and suddenly have so much to talk about. In the past few months I changed my raiding main from Quaiche (Feral Tank) to Clavain (Warlock), Patch 3.1 came out which changed everything, we started raiding Ulduar, I’ve been continuing to tweak my addons, and I decided to make Quaiche into a healer.
Whew!
Playing Clavain in Ulduar has been a kick. I was very fortunate to have geared him up very quickly in the weeks preceding patch 3.1 so he was ready to go into Ulduar the day the patch hit. (Although that day actually SUCKED ASS and nobody got to raid Ulduar as far as I can tell.)
Playing a warlock is fun. My first toon in WoW was a Horde warlock on Sargeras. Managing pets, DoTs, direct damage, pumping health and mana around like it is water… all while casting as much direct damage as you can… is FUN. I’ve been tanking for so long I forgot how much fun it was to actually be competitive in the DPS meters.
Ulduar has been a blast to learn. In my opinion, while Naxx was fun in its own way, it was really still a 40-man raid. They’d tuned it down, but it never felt like an instance that was really designed for 10- or 25-man raids. The fact that you could just run through AOEing like mad is evidence of that.
Ulduar on the other hand is a place designed for the way guild raid now. Trash pulls you have to plan out or you wipe. CC is back! Mana management matters. AOE isn’t the only way to go. Tons of changes… all of which I like.
On the addon front, I’ve been continuing all my projects. oUF_Quaiche is still getting regular updates and has come a long way since last I posted about it here. I’ve taken over maintenance of BigBrother which is a fav by the raid leaders in my guild. I helped Cladhaire with some of NinjaPanel’s features. All that fun geek stuff I can’t stop doing.
Our guild is still strong. And big. We’re still around 150 accounts and 500 toons. We’ve been pretty stable at that number since end of BC, so nothing new there. We’ve been progressing quite well. We’re 7/14 in 10-man Ulduar and 4/14 in 25-man Ulduar, which I think it quite good for a casual raiding guild.
Somewhere in the last few weeks, we got all out talent points refunded and I was so engrossed in my warlock at the time, I completely forgot to spec Quaiche. This week I was logged in on him and started thinking about what I wanted to do. I’ve not been a serious healer since early Burning Crusades… and I always threatened to make him a healer in Lich King. “What the hell,” I said, and specced him 11/0/60. Spent a few of my 240-odd Emblems of Heroism and I was good to go.
Now to find some Naxx PUGs to practice on and get a few more pieces of gear.
More soon on my return to Resto.
Been continuing work on some of my addons and figured an update post was due.
I first wrote about Grunt a week ago. Since then I’ve got it almost done and have published a beta to Curse.
The feature list has slightly expanded:
The only part that doesn’t seem to be working 100% as of yesterday is the accept invites from friends and guildies. That was working before so it shouldn’t take much to fix.
Developer checkins:
http://wow.curseforge.com/projects/grunt/
Beta and Official Releases:
http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/grunt.aspx
I started ChannelLock back in December and while it continued to get a bit of attention here and there, some annoying timing bugs prevented me from releasing a beta.
I seem to have worked all of that out now, so the first beta is available on Curse.
Here’s the official description:
Have you ever found that the channels you're joined to changes without any rhyme or reason? Or that you log over to another toon and don't have the channels you had on your main? Or maybe they change channel numbers and what used to be in /4 is now in /5?
ChannelLock was created to solve these problems. You simply provide the channel names and associated chat frames and it does the rest.
Developer checkins:
http://wow.curseforge.com/projects/channel-lock/
Beta and Official Releases:
http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/channel-lock.aspx
My newest zero-configuration addon is a simple solution to a simple problem. Everyone is now collecting achievements and the titles that go with them. But which title should you display?
Don’t fret, just let Titleist take care of it for you.
Every 5 minutes, Titleist will change your title randomly. Just install and go. No configuration required.
Developer checkins:
http://wow.curseforge.com/projects/titleist/
Beta and Official Releases:
http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/titleist.aspx
If, like me, you are a reader of The Big Bear butt and if you read that blog with a feed reader, you may not have seen any posts in a while. It sounds like he’s having an RSS issue:
I posted before that Feedburner no likey my upgraded Wordpress 2.7 install, and the widget they have provided just doesn’t work anymore.
So, I had to change to the current self-provided RSS feed for feedreaders…
But this means that anyone that only ever got my posts via a Feedburner provided feed thinks that I’ve gone silent for over a month.
I still get folks, nearly every day, email me to let me know that they haven’t had any posts in their feedreader from me in a long time, and asking if I’m still blogging.
I figure that the number of folks that haven’t checked the site to see why I went silent probably outnumber the ones that mail in.
So, I humbly, most pathetically ask that, if possible, my fellow blogger friends please make a teeny, tiny mini-post just mentioning that Bear is a dumbass and has a broken Feed, and if they are still interested in getting my posts, folks need to please, pretty-please visit the site and subscribe to the new feed.
I honestly can’t think of any other way of getting the word out at this point… since the Feed is broken.
Word to the wise… never trust to third party free service providers to continue to provide free services. Not if you like to NOT mess up your fun.
Seriously, thank you very much in advance.
So check your links, and if in doubt, go back to the website (in a browser) and re-subscribe to his RSS feed.
Enjoy!
I’ve been hacking on a few new addon projects. These are those kinds of addons that either do exactly what you want, or you probably don’t want them. Grunt started out as a bunch of hacks I had in a script file that someone asked me to share. QTrackerPosition came about as a result of me getting annoyed at the default positioning of the Quest and Achevement tracking frames.
Grunt
Functions
Performs the following functions for you
Disabling functions
If you dont’ want one of these functions, comment out the appropriate RegisterEvent call in the PLAYER_LOGIN event handler. It should be pretty easy to figure out. :)
Information and Download (alpha quality):
http://github.com/PProvost/grunt/
QTrackerPosition
I might make the position configurable some day, but for now they are hard coded.
Information and Download (alpha quality):
It was simply titled “Rules of the Road” and had the following content:
My dad taught my 1-3 when I was growing up. He had ulcer issues as a younger man because he let stress build up too much. Those rules help you get grounded when you feel stressed and show you simple ways out, even when, as in Rule #1, the out is to ignore the issue.
Numbers 4-5 are extensions I’ve added over time to help me guide my life. Help your friends. Admit when you make a mistake. Do not be afraid to change your mind. Don’t let other people convince you that “flip flopping” in the presence of new information is somehow bad. When you know better, do better.
The final one is the newest addition to the family. Sometimes many people, when presented with a request they has to say no to, will seek a rationalization or a story that they can use to justify saying no. Here’s the thing… you don’t have to justify saying No. You shouldn’t be rude, you should be always polite and respectful, but you can just say, “No, I’m sorry but I can’t,” and leave it at that.
This game is a game. We pay for it. There is no good reason to let yourself get into a situation where you are angry or upset. Passion is good, negative emotions are not.
I was going to write a post that talked about our first foray into Naxx-25, but Hautian, one of our Paladin main-tanks, beat me to it.
http://hautian.blogspot.com/2009/01/taste-of-twenty-five.html
Read her post for more detail, but basically our “test run” showed that we are going to squash this place.
She also writes a nice description of our first real attempt on Sarth with one drake up. We chose Tenebron and the team did well, but couldn’t quite get it done this time. Soon!
