Metaplanar Babel

WoW finally caters to the fashion conscious. I especially love the picture at the top of the warlock in the wedding gown with his succubus.. o.O

Vharie has reached level 40. Flaming poneh ftw~

It’s kind of sad, in a way, how much more enjoyable WoW is once you’ve reached 40. Having a mount makes such a huge difference. I don’t mind running all over the place any more, because it doesn’t take nearly as long to get there. Plus, my felsteed is just darn cool. I feel like I’ve beaten WoW - I finally have my own pony.

Hopefully I can keep myself from getting too much experience, since I’d like to do some Warsong Gulch runs while I’m at the top of a level bracket. I did a few duels the other day, against Omasu and a random extremely well-geared rogue who wandered by. Somewhat surprisingly, I had far more problems with Omasu than the rogue, even though rogues are the bane of most PvP fights. And once I pulled out my succubus, I was practically unbeatable. I’m not usually very good at that kind of thing, because my hand-eye coordination isn’t the best, so it was a lot of fun to get to kick some ass for a while. Vharie is basically built to be a “tank-mage”; she has tons of hitpoints and lifedraining abilities that make her extremely difficult to kill. My problem against Omasu originally was that he could interrupt my Drain Life spell, thus preventing me from healing and doing damage both. Once I got my succubus out, however, we started doing enough damage that he was more worried about healing himself than trying to finish me off or interrupt my spells; of course, that only increased the amount of damage I could do in the meantime. And the rogue couldn’t finish me off before I killed him, since my succubus broke up his stunlock chain with seduce. It was interesting to see that the build I’ve been working towards actually works the way its main proponent on the forums has claimed it would. I guess we’ll see how good it actually is if I can ever get into a WSG match.

Zelda Online for Halo CE - Nifty

Holy bouncing ninjas, Batman

Good job, cruinh. Your evil plot has succeeded. We’re hooked. (Thanks, by the way )

Have I mentioned that I really can’t wait for this to be released? This guy looks really freakin awesome!

tequila mockingbird has the coolest site name ever. really.

Somewhat to my own amazement, I’ve been having a lot of fun in WoW lately. After giving a druid and a priest a try on Horde, I gave in to the Dark Side and made a warlock, which has since cruised to level 33 36 39 with minimal effort. It’s funny, because I never really wanted to play one at all - yet here I am, having more fun with the game than ever. In a way, I think the class is poorly represented - a lot of people seem to focus on the soloing ability and think that means they suck in groups, which, as we discovered last night, is complete bullshit. Like the hunter, the warlock is a class that’s easy to solo (though the warlock isn’t quite as easy as a hunter) but very difficult to play well in a group. The primary reason for that is because a good warlock (like a good hunter) is typically doing 5 or 6 different things at once, especially in a difficult instance.

For example, last night, Omasu (32-33 shaman), Ravenwight (30-31 warrior), and Vharie (my 33 warlock) decided to give Razorfen Kraul a shot. RFK is an instance in the Southern Barrens with lots of uh.. gnolls or kobolds or something. Most of the instance ranges from level 25 to 31+, all elites. Typically, the place would be a good challenge for a full group of players our levels. We decided to trio it, however, and somehow it worked. I had such a blast - I spent most of the fights seducing one of the mobs (like mez) with my succubus pet, Jhorva, putting my mad DoTs on the current target, and occassionally offtanking something else (not often though). I found it amusing to see that I had more hitpoints than either of my teammates and was almost as durable as the shaman despite my cloth caster status. We did die a few times, mostly to extremely large pulls (read: more than 4) or to a couple of nasty boss encounters that we weren’t quite expecting. But, thanks to my soulstone rezzing and the shaman’s self-rez, we never had to run back from a wipe, so we were back up and running very quickly.

It’s amazing how much a warlock can do under the right circumstances. I was doing damage, weakening the mob, crowd controlling as necessary, acting as secondary damage through my succubus pet, preventing runners, positioning mobs so mez didn’t get broken, etc. It was great to know that I could handle a bit of aggro, so the warrior didn’t have to drop everything and run over to save my ass and the shaman didn’t have to chain heal me to keep me up. I occassionally ran into a few mana problems (not many), but those will be mostly fixed when I get Dark Pact at 40. I felt extremely useful and vital to the group, without actually being able to directly affect my teammates at all - defensive in an offensive way, sort of. I was able to keep to the back, keep an eye on things, help with pulling thanks to Seduce.. I never really felt like I wasn’t in some control of the situation.

It’s very interesting, because traditionally I haven’t liked the characters who couldn’t directly aid their teammates (via healing, usually). But now I find myself really enjoying a character who has huge amounts of control over a situation and can very easily turn the tide of battle, without ever casting anything like a heal. It’s almost liberating not to have to watch life bars. I don’t, because I can’t do anything about them. I watch the battle and try to even the odds as best as I can, while trying to do as much damage as possible at the same time. Finally, I’ve found a class where my ability to multi-task is being tested. I love it! It’s a challenge, but not so hard and tedious that it’s frustrating. Of course, it helps that I have a steady group of friends who are also very good at what they do.

Best of all, I get a free flaming nightmare of doom at 40. I guess I really am evil at heart.

Thanks to PA for the link; I heard this news story on the radio yesterday morning and meant to look it up when I got to work, but I forgot. Amusing, though I can just see it becoming another stab at the “nuts” who are into fantasy/SCA/RPGs.

Maybe there’s hope for IE7 after all. Obviously “to-do” lists don’t always get done, but it’s still good to see the bugs acknowledged.