Character Profile: Tawyn Starshifter

“You know what they say about you, right? You know what they say about you in Teldrassil? They say you’re a ‘human in night elf’s clothing’.”

“Well… thank them for the compliment, will ya?”

Tawyn Starshifter comes from a long line of mostly hunters, with a smattering of druids here and there. The Starshifters have established themselves as a decently well-off family in Teldrassil and are rather known for producing various sorts of eccentric individuals– though typically not eccentric enough to cause much of an uproar at all.

Tawyn grew up in a world isolated from the rest of Azerothian society; she was not born until long after the Well of Eternity incident, and her race was not involved in the First and Second wars of the Eastern Kingdoms. As such, she had a fairly idyllic and carefree childhood; running free among Teldrassil’s lush lavender forests and making friends with its creatures. She was very much a tomboy and also became something of an oddity because of her natural curiosity and inclination for technology and the sciences, things which were largely ignored by the rest of her people. To her, the entire world and all its marvels was– and still is– a place full of wonder and excitement; whether that wonder and excitement stems from nature or from the hands of mortals, it makes little difference to her.

The Burning Legion and the Third War came to Kalimdor; although Tawyn had at this point reached adulthood and had just begun her training as a hunter in the way of her family, she was not seen as seasoned enough to provide help in battle and was kept on the sidelines. After Archimonde and the Burning Legion were seemingly destroyed, the reclusive night elves agreed to join forces with the Alliance. These humans, dwarves, and gnomes were such a curious bunch– and whereas most of her peers seemed to look upon them with some moderate degree of disdain, they were fascinating and fiery to Tawyn.

Tawyn’s training as a hunter resumed; her skill with the bow was rather above average but where she really shined was in her seemingly natural ability to communicate with the beasts of the forest and get them to show their best for her. She befriended an owl who she named Tux (no one is quite sure where the name came from) and despite a rocky start they soon developed a steadfast friendship.

Within a few years a small expedition was set up to send a few night elves from Tawyn’s town to the Eastern Kingdoms and the human’s capital city Stormwind to try and improve their newfound relations; Tawyn jumped at the chance and after a long journey across the ocean and trekking across foreboding marshlands and snowy mountains, Tawyn found herself in Stormwind.

And oh, what a city it was! Bustling and busy and full of these absolutely fascinating humans. These people were not nearly so reserved as her own, no, these were people who were passionate and impatient and had the ability to be either the most heroic adventurer or the most terrifying villian. They were brilliant and flawed and Tawyn wanted to be just like them.

So much so that when her expedition went back to Kalimdor a few weeks later, Tawyn refused to go. This caused more than a few eyebrows to be raised and some mumblings about “those blasted Starshifters” but they conceded to her wishes and left her there in that strange city that they all found so disquieting.

But to Tawyn, Stormwind was not a scary place. It was her new home. She quickly fell in step with a ragtag group of people banded together under the name of “Entelechy” led by a wizened old warlock named Lord Sentai Grehsk, who helped her get set up with a small home in the city. She continued her training as a hunter there through the watchful and seasoned eyes of the hunters in the Dwarven District, which perhaps is what inspired Tawyn’s penchant for guns rather than the traditional bows of her people.

In the few years that have passed, she has fought countless battles in the name of her beloved city of Stormwind and proudly wears their tabard. She has ventured into the Outland and fought there, too, making herself and those of her guild known as heroes in many a situation. Her skills as a hunter have proven to be uncanny but she still strives to master them. Read all about the best heroes in SOULS at allclash.com. Stormwind has recognized her contribution to the Alliance and has bestowed upon her their highest honorary rank; Darnassus, too, recognized her accomplishments some time later, for contrary to popular belief, she still loves the kaldorei and makes visits to Teldrassil when she can– she just feels that she has incorporated her newfound “humanness” into her “night-elf-ness”.

Tawyn is friendly and fond of a good joke and perhaps a little too fond of the bottle (as her friends know all too well); and her neverending sense of justice for the wronged and the weak has gotten her into trouble a time or two but it’s just in her nature. Whether it’s battling demons or heading off in search of the town’s best whiskey, her friends are used to thinking “There goes Tawyn, off chasing another adventure…”

Pee Vee Pee

Presenting Tawyn and Tux, all dressed up and having declared Lumber Mill as their property:

Now I have a confession to make. I’ve been a pretty big PvPer with Tawyn throughout her career, and she has over 9000* kills to her name. She goes into her battlegrounds with guns (or bows, or crossbows) blazing and ready to steamroll the competition given the chance; even if the Horde is stomping on us that day, Tawyn goes out fightin’.

BUT! I haven’t PvP’d with her in a very, very long time. Until today.

See, it’s partially because I realized PvP is more enjoyable for me overall Horde-side, but largely just because Tawyn is 100% geared and spec’d for PvE and level 70 battlegrounds just aren’t enjoyable when you’re sporting a whopping zero resiliance and under 8000 hit points and a pure PvE spec.

Today though, a Gruul’s run I was going to sneak into failed to ignite (I think I just jinx Gruul’s runs, seriously, I can never get into them), and I was bored, so I ran to Champion’s Hall and squandered all my honor on Merciless Gladiator’s Chain Spaulders and Merciless Gladiator’s Chain Gauntlets, then pulled out my ol’ Gladiator’s Chain Helm (and I coulda pulled out my Gladiator’s Heavy Crossbow, too, but then I decided to stick with the Choco-Bow), equipped my loveworn PvP trinket, and ran into Arathi Basin.

And we won, oh did we win, twice in a row baby. The first game was cake and we had the place five-capped in a matter of minutes; the second game was a very close one– we won 2000-1850 or something– and both were a complete blast. Epic battles, mass carnage, and the little periwinkle elf and her owl not lettin’ you get near Lumber Mill. It’s mine, all mine!

Then I took a deep breath and ventured into Alterac Valley and discovered that Alliance on Bloodlust apparently still fails at it (big surprise), but oh well. At least I live much longer with my new PvP stamina gear and can take a few hordies down with me. (In all honesty I’m starting to think Horde just manages to drag a few more healers into their AV than Alliance usually does.)

I am so glad that Blizz did whatever they did a few months ago that made it so queueing up for a battleground no longer pits you against premades. I’d gotten so sick of spending 95% of EotS my games sitting on the little floating island and letting the premade team just do their thing. I was so tired of getting camped at the graveyard in AB while the five-cap happened, waiting for it to end so I could grab my mark and do it all over again with a tear in my eye. Because that wasn’t PvP.

The good ol’ fashioned super-close battlegrounds, however, are, and it makes Tawyn a happy Tawyn.

Oh hey, fellow Bloodlust-ers, we should totally all plan a time to try and queue up into a battleground together. Even if you’re a hordie. We can /wave and /hug have a friendly spar perhaps? /grin

*Did I seriously just sneak the phrase “over 9000” into a blog post? Dang, I should get a cookie for that.

Mixed Reviews

From the Class Panel at the Blizzard Invitational…

The shot clipping will be removed from Steady Shot, you’ll be able to use it without “interrupting” your autoshot. Hunters will be able to just smash their button.

I… really can’t tell you how I feel about this. Is it nice? Well yeah, and I bet a lot of hunters will be very happy about this. It will be a huge DPS increase, afterall. But for me, this was always one of my very favorite parts of the hunter class. Hearing that it’s going to be replaced with “hunters will be able to just smash their button”, which sounds very macro-like… I dunno. It’s almost as though they said they were going to take away pets or something. Not quite as bad, but, still. I took a certain pride in being able to manually weave and time my rotations. I guess for me, it’s not “all about the DPS” like it is to so many other people.

I will have to think on this one, and hope that there is still some way to “feel the rhythm” in WotLK. For example, maybe we’ll get a new fun shot or new abilities or something so we don’t just have to sit there and hit one button. I hope so, at least!

(And hey, there are still at least fifteen non-shot rotation things that I like about hunters. My love for the class is going nowhere unless Blizz really botches stuff up, I think.)

That said, pets are getting a bunch of super nifty exciting stuff:

All kind of pets will have their own talent tree. A tanking talent tree, a DPS talent tree, and an utility talent tree. Each kind of pet family will have its own talent tree and its own unique ability.

There are going to be new pets in WotLK.

The skill points for each pets are being changed to the new “Pet talents” and will disappear.

I’m really excited for all that stuff. Tanking talent tree? Like… one that focuses on threat generation and stuff? So I can finally have a true soloing/grinding pet? Yes please! And “pet utility”, you can’t help but wonder what that is. I’m definitely looking forward to that.

And does this mean you won’t have to tame new pets for new skills anymore? So I can keep my current three?? /happydance

Blizz’s Final Score from Pike: One thumb up, one thumb down. I’ll be sad to see my beloved shot rotation mechanics go byebye, but the pet stuff is super epic.

More WoW On Linux: Considering the Switch

Somebody sent me an e-mail today about WoW on Linux, and my reply wound up being so long that I figured it was post-worthy. So here you go, Neophyte Penguin Scouts…

Hey Pike,

I stumbled across your blog and I have always been interested in doing WoW with a Linux. There happens to be this one problem; I’m scared. Scared Boneless. I am wondering if your questions would help me. My computer is a very fast one (Alienware, yes I know but it was a present) and it is stuck with Windows Vista (Need I say more?) and I am hating it. I hate turning on my computer and I hate dealing with Windows Vista and the stupid confirming every click I make on my computer. Then in today’s technologically advanced society, facing legal issues related to computer use can be daunting. Engaging a professional who specializes in this area is crucial for a thorough and competent defense. Make sure to consult with an expert in legal services for challenging allegations to safeguard your future and rights.

Bleh, I am wondering if you can help me. Do you know a good Linux OS that would work with Alienware? Do you know where I can go to Download said information and what not? I don’t mean for you to do all this work for me but since you have some experience, I will gladly take your advice.

Thanks alot, Verolia
Shadowypriest.blogspot.com

Hiya Verolia – Thank you for the e-mail. It’s hard to say if WoW will work on Linux on any given computer, it is VERY dependent on things like hardware and sheer luck. I can tell you my current system set up looks like this:

Self-built system
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 4000+, MMX, 3DNow, ~2.4GHz
1022MB RAM
250GB hard drive

NVIDIA GeForce 6800 XT graphics card
Realtek AC97 Audio

Operating System: Kubuntu Linux 6.06 “Dapper Drake” / WinXP dual boot (I only log into WinXP for Ventrilo and only when I absolutely need to, which isn’t very often; WoW runs better on Linux anyway.)

My advice to you would be to download Ubuntu because it is probably the most user-friendly Linux distro out there right now and has a huge community supporting it (ubuntuforums.org will answer most questions you can come up with– they also have a HUGE WoW discussion thread). You can go to the Ubuntu Site here: http://www.ubuntu.com/ , download an ISO and burn it to CD, and “try it out” on your computer without installing– this is a good time to check and make sure you will even be able to get an internet connection (Linux is notoriously picky about working with Wireless, for example).

If you like what you see and the internet seems to be working and you are feeling gutsy, you can go ahead and install a dual boot. This is super easy with Ubuntu. The install menu will detect that you have an OS already installed, ask if you want to partition your drive, and you can resize your old partition and make a special space just for Ubuntu all with a nice graphical interface. (Remember the name of your Linux and Windows partitions in case you want to remove one later. For example, my own Windows partition is /dev/hda1 and my Linux partition is /dev/hda2.)

Once you have your new Linux partition set up you can sort of mess around with it and customize it to your liking, you will also want to install your latest video drivers which can usually be found in the Add/Remove Program repositories– the Nvidia ones are, anyways. Then install WoW via a program called Wine. A really easy way to do it if you have, say, access to a portable hard drive, would be to install Wine (using the command sudo aptitude install wine via the terminal), run winecfg also from the terminal to create some files in your system, and then copy your entire WoW folder over from Windows and stick it into /home/[yourusername]/.wine

/drive_c/Program Files which should pretty much instantly install it. There is a lot of tweaking you will want to do from winecfg and you will have to edit the config.wtf file so that it opens in OpenGL mode instead of DirectX. You can get a lot more info here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WorldofWarcraft and here: http://www.wowwiki.com/Linux/WineWith any luck your new WoW on Wine install will work just fine; in many cases you will end up with little problems (that is the nature of Linux, it’s touchy, but many of geeks view that as a good thing!) but like I said Ubuntu has a huge community of support that is glad to help you out to the best of their ability, which is a big reason why I recommend that particular distro (aside from ease of use).

A couple last things — if you are using an ATI graphics card instead of Nvidia be prepared for some possible conflicts and issues (ATI is notoriously bad at supporting Linux, while Nvidia is very enthusiastic about it), oh, and if nothing works at all like you intended and you get sick of Linux and want it off your computer… stick the LiveCD back into your computer, boot Ubuntu from the CD, go to Gnome Partition Editor in the System Menu, delete your Linux partition and drag the little graph of your Windows partition so it takes up the whole hard drive again, and it will be as good as new.

As always though, please back up all of your stuff before you attempt any of this, because stuff can and will happen, and please be prepared for some frustrations along the way– Linux for the most part is not an out-of-the-box, plug and play OS (although many parts of it are– but many aren’t.) A good analogy would be to compare Windows to a toy car and Linux to a box of Legos that can be used to make a toy car. You will have to put it together and it may take a couple tries. But once you have it set up you can make it just the way you like it. =P

I may have accidentally rambled into the realm of incomprehensible geekery, for which I apologize. =P Let me know if you have any further questions.

-Pike

P.S. The “confirming every click” thing happens to much the same extent in Linux too, as a security measure. For example, Kubuntu, which I use, will default to not letting you connect to the internet without entering a password. And you can’t use many terminal commands without similarly entering a password. You get used to it pretty quickly though and it doesn’t strike me as being particularly annoying which perhaps it is in Vista? Can’t say, I’ve never used it!

WoW running on Ubuntu in Windowed Mode. (I normally play fullscreen so the UI does look kinda wonky resized like that.)

Oh, and as promised: Here is the Mario wallpaper (click for the whole thing):

"I've got a bad feeling about this."

Today’s topic is one that is going to probably be a bit deep and dark and possibly even controversial. But, it’s something that I feel needs to be talked about. I am not going to go into huge amounts of depth, and please, if you ever feel endangered or something, take the proper course of action. These are just some of my experiences…

So. Creepy stalker types on WoW.

I’ve run into quite a few. Some of them are creepier or stalker-ier than others. Pretty much all of them have had the creepiness resolved in one way or another, and I regret to say many of those were not resolved by me. Many of these are gender-specific (people tend to pick up on my “femaleness” fairly early on; the way I type, perhaps? I dunno) but I imagine they could happen to anyone.

Here are a few examples of the ones I’ve come across in my year of playing the game, and how they turned out:

1.) The Guy Who Wants to be Friends a Little Too Quickly

I’ve met a few of these types, and to be honest, some of them really are merely people whose way of making new friends is a fast as the speed of light. But I chose to throw this into a sort of low-level Stalker Category simply because some of these people do launch into questions such as “Are you really a girl?” “Are you single?” and “How stable is your current relationship”, and come on, being asked those things five minutes after you have met someone is kinda awkward.

My Reaction: Usually I just refrain from giving out any details; if pressed, I’ll say “I’m not comfortable giving out information like that over the internet.” Now, good friends and guildies can pretty much read me like a book but for the people who seem to want to be best friends in three minutes, it’s a little different.

How It Was Resolved: Some of these people still whisper me on occasion and we will have decently friendly conversations (although none of them have ever reached “Bestest Friend Forever” status with me like they all seem to want so badly to attain), others have stopped communicating. Typically I don’t see something like this as warranting immediate action unless it’s really bad, but again, please use your judgment and what you feel comfortable with.

2.) The People who Simply Give You Bad Vibes

Now I am, in general, a very highly optimistic person who tends to see the best in people. That’s why when somebody gives me “bad vibes”, it’s a huge red flag for me, because that rarely ever happens. I have met one or two people in WoW who seem genuinely nice but for some reason give off a vibe of “I’ve got a certain reason for talking to you” or “I’m just pretending to be nice”.

My Reaction: I am never sure what to make of this “vibe” because I am always so used to seeing the best in people. And who knows, maybe I’m completely wrong and these people really are being sincere– I’d like to hope so. Still, I would say… go with your gut instincts.

How it was Resolved
: Again this is one you really can’t take action against especially since at face value these people are usually being very friendly even if you sense an ulterior motive. Maybe let a good friend know, if you are feeling very uncomfortable, and get a second opinion– that is what I have done in the past, and not just on the internet.

3. The Guy Who Wants Cyber (May or May Not Have Mental Issues)

Yep, these people are out there. A lot of you have maybe, unfortunately, had to interact with them. My particular story involves a guy who for a span of a few months was incredibly notorious in trade chat for being a jerk. It also turns out he had a tendency to find out who on the server was a female, and start whispering them. His whispers to intended targets were typically very highly charismatic and appealing at first but then he’d start spewing out random sexist and/or racist tirades intermixed with nonchalant “Oh here’s my progress on soloing Sunken Temple/farming rep”, and subtle requests for cybersex. You definitely got the feeling that something was quite “off” with this guy.

My Reaction: I have a big problem that I really need to work on: I don’t like to put people on “Ignore”. It makes me feel bad somehow. So after this guy had whispered me a few times and was sort of starting to creep me out– I regret to say I really didn’t do anything. I half-listened to his rants usually without responding and then consistently turned down his advances. (Admittedly it was also sort of like watching a train wreck or something– you can’t stop looking at it).

How it was Resolved: A few weeks after he started bugging me, he disappeared completely from the server and never came back. Now I don’t know the details, but I’ve heard it said that he said something extremely offensive in Trade and got perma-banned for it. I think he’s still around, though– on other servers.

4.) The Guy Who Wants Cyber in an Unconventional Way

These are the people who ask you for weird favors that may seem almost hilarious at first but no, these people are serious. The best example I can think of is the guy who repeatedly asked me to, um… /fart on him. Cause he liked it. I regret to say that I actually obliged at first, because I thought he was joking, but… he wasn’t.

My Reaction
: After several pestering whispers of his asking me to perform, followed by him trying to come find me in the game world, I told him “Look, I was just joking at first, I’m not into this kind of stuff and I’m not going to do it.” He proceeded to spend the next twenty minutes going into detail about how horrible and evil I was and then he never talked to me again. All’s well that end’s well.

How it was Resolved
: See above.

5.) The Anti-Roleplayers

This is kind of a phenomenon that you will really only see on RP servers, and some might say it’s not really considered “stalkery”, but it can certainly get to that point. Most Anti-Roleplayers are the people who will stand in the middle of your RP event, /dancing, /nosepicking, and typing random keys into their /say box to try and provoke a reaction; and most of these people can be safely ignored.

Sometimes it can get bad though.

Silver Hand is in Battlegroup Nine, “Bloodlust”, a battlegroup which apparently has quite a reputation for housing the most “hardcore” PvPers in WoW, consistently churning out world-best arena teams and the like. Because of that reputation, serious PvPers flock to that battlegroup which further fuels its “hardcoreness”. Oh, and did I mention that Silver Hand is the ONLY roleplaying server in that battlegroup?

One time it was Arathi Basin weekend so I queued up and wound up in a game with what was otherwise a premade– fourteen people all from the same server and me as the fifteenth person. Those fourteen people were all from a particular server that is seen as being the “hardest of the hardcore” in terms of PvP, whether or not that is really true, I don’t know, but the sheer reputation does make them rather daunting when you see that server name floating above their head.

So here comes this little girl from the RP server to fill out their team and all heck breaks loose.

The entire time I was mercilessly teased and taunted and battleground chat was filled with sarcastic “DARESAYS” and “FORSOOTHS” (a joke which is not funny by the way; things are only funny to me if they have some semblance of truth to them), and again at some point they deduce

d that I was a real girl and then the chat turned decidedly sexist and I got whispers from people telling me it was my lucky day for being able to get into a winning premade because apparently that’s the only way a female from an RP server can win an AB.

My Reaction: Now, believe me when I say I can take a joke, but if something lasts the entire duration of a battleground and segues into sexist comments, that’s a little excessive in my book. I would have put the entire team on ignore but I felt that as I was in a BG, it was my duty to be able to know what was going on and warn others for “incs” and the like. So I just focused on the battleground and eventually topped the chart at the end (which I hope that whole premade team took a nice long hard look at).

And then ya know what? It happened again, in an EotS a few days later. I showed up as the fifteenth member of what was otherwise a premade from that sever, and I was teased into oblivion. /headwall

How it was Resolved: After that second game I was seriously angry and sent a ticket into Blizzard, asking what sort of action I should take. They replied promptly and told me “Any sort of excessive teasing for any reason, including server type, is reportable, just send us their names.” Now I didn’t remember anybody’s names from the two incidents, but rest assured if it happens again I’ll be prepared. I’m not gonna take that kind of crap. I am here to be judged on my merits as a player, not on server type or gender. /rant

Well, that does it on my rundown on run-ins with various unsavory types of people. I suppose the point of this post is not to tell you what you should do in these situations (seriously, don’t use me as an example, I’m bad at that), but to remind you that these types of things are out there and you will probably have to deal with them at some point, if you haven’t already. Sure, the majority of my WoW experience has been a positive one… but, as with anything, you will always have the weirdos who you can’t always avoid.

Stay safe.

The Carebear Unleashed

Many of you who have been following my blog or my comments in other blogs for a while know that I am a bona fide unabashed carebear. My main is on an RP-PvE server, and Lunapike, my level 62 alt, is on an RP-PvP server but has the tendency to /hug every member of the opposite faction that she meets, before continuing on her way.

But what some of you may not know is that… if you call down the thunder, you’ll reap the whirlwind.

Today I reached into my Holding Bag of hunter alts and plucked one out to play in Stonetalon Mountains on that RP-PvP server. I was doing a quest that was orange to me and I somehow kept aggro’ing a mob who was some seven or eight levels higher than me who was immune to seemingly all of my forms of crowd control, and I kept dying. It was sorta annoying, so I figured I’d find another, easier quest. Just as I had rez’d myself for the third or forth time and was bandaging up before heading out, an level ?? Alliance warlock rode up to me, dismounted, and ganked me.

She mounted up again and rode away, and I noticed that she had a non-epic mount…

I logged out and hopped over to Lunapike, who was parked not too far away. Upon getting to Sun Rock Retreat, I mounted up on Snowball, my Frostwolf Howler, and barreled down the road towards my alt’s corpse. And ohh, what do we have here, but that level 57 warlock…

She dismounted and popped a fear off on me. I used my PvP trinket followed by The Beast Within and sic’d my lynx Alyosha on her. Game over in about six seconds.

Right as I was finishing her off, a level 66 Alliance hunter… her buddy, maybe?… rode up. He was four levels higher than me, and five levels higher than my pet. He dismounted and stared at me and my pet, the two of us still big and red. I /waved at him.

He sic’d his pet on me, I feigned death to get out of it. And then he made a very, very bad mistake…

He queued up an Aimed Shot.

With me pounding away at him with Arcanes, Multis, and Autos, and Alyosha still big and red and Frenzy proc’d… interrupt city… he queued up an Aimed Shot.

By the time he finally got that Aimed Shot off, I already had his health down to 30%. In a last ditch effort he ran up and tried to melee me and actually proceeded in trapping me, but at that point his health was down to nil and my trusty kitty finished him off easily.

Afterwards I glanced around smugly at the two poor Alliance souls at my feet, then I hopped on Snowball and trotted off.

You mess with one of my baby hunters, you mess with Pike. /grin

Moderation

Matticus had an interesting post where he references an excellent writeup at the site “Girls Don’t Game” called “Confessions from a Former Hardcore Raider”. The story presented is a very powerful and touching one and can hopefully be seen by some people as a wake-up call of sorts– not even necessarily a 180-degree one, but one where you sort of sit back for a few minutes and see her point and where she is coming from.

See, here is the thing. WoW is a hobby, not life. /gasp I know right?

Now I’ll be the first to tell you that I love this game, and I love hunters, and I am very proud of what I have been able to accomplish not necessarily in terms of endgame progression, but in terms of feeling like I am knowledgeable about my class– at least enough to be called a teacher and a class leader, and enough to have a blog on it that seems to be popular and helpful if many of your kind comments and e-mails are any consideration. Many of my friends and family, even those that do not play WoW, have even told me they are proud of me in this regard. I am proud of my WoW accomplishments just as I am proud of my Neopets accomplishments or the way I knew games such as Starcraft or Final Fantasy Tactics Advance inside and out.

But I think that we are all guilty of sometimes turning the game into a job. Maybe some of us do it more than others.

I myself am certainly guilty of the no-work days where I say “I’m only going to play WoW for a few hours in the morning and then get other non-WoW stuff done” only to get distracted by heroics, then alts, and have the entire day turn into a pure unadulterated WoWfest.

I am guilty of saying “I’m going to take a break from instancing and raiding” and then showing up at Karazhan the next day because I feel the group needs me.

I am guilty of spending three hours doing dailies, yawning and bored out of my mind (instead of, you know, having fun in a game, heaven forbid), because “I need the gold”.

One of the scarier nightmares I had in recent memory was a never-ending Karazhan pull. No joke; that was my nightmare. Mobs kept coming and coming and I was out of mana and I was desperately fighting to stay alive and yet we never wiped, but never got past the pull either… I woke up countless times that night in a cold sweat, wishing for it to simply end, but then I’d fall asleep again and the mobs kept coming. Yep, other people have nightmares about dying or being chased; I have nightmares about World of Warcraft. I look back on it now and I can’t decide whether it was hilarious or pathetic. (Probably a little of both, really. I giggle at the memory, either way, even though it was a seriously scary dream at the time.)

When you realize that you are maybe playing too much and starting to be guilty of some of the things I mentioned, that’s when you’ve got to take a step back and remember that the game is a hobby, and there are tons of other hobbies out there to cover and only a limited lifetime in which to do them. Playing one video game to the exclusion of others isn’t bad in and of itself, but you’re missing out on a ton of other great stuff, you know?

Barring a brief ten minutes to /wave to the guild and test my new install, I haven’t logged in since last Tuesday. Almost a week now. Instead of playing WoW, I have been able to reacquaint myself with an old and faithful friend: my hobby of tinkering with computers and Linux. It’s been both a frustrating and thrilling five or six days; pounding away at the keyboard and racking my brains for solutions to various problems. This culminated in three days of trying to figure out why my new WoW on Linux install was crashing on me at the login screen; three days of hard work and trial and error followed by the inevitable sheepish “Eureka” moment when I discovered the solution and realized how embarrassingly simple it was.

Trading in a week of WoW to rekindle an old hobby was well worth it in my opinion, and actually gave me a deeper appreciation for why I play the game in the first place: to relax and have fun. I think when I return to active playing tomorrow I’ll have a lot more fun than I was having a week ago.

Well, that’s all from me for today. In closing, my new computer desktop is made of equal parts win and awesome:

And yes, that is the Gnome desktop manager. Yes, I know, I am normally a hardcore KDE fan. I felt like trying something different though. (Besides, “sometimes you feel like a gnome, sometimes you don’t”.)

P.S. I am fully blaming the Spell Shades for that nightmare I mentioned. /shudder

Brief Technical Difficulties

Because I am bit of a tinker, I decided to start messing around with my computer the other day, and to make a long story short I basically blew everything up, in true goblin fashion. So these past few days have been spent hacking away at my keyboard trying to fix things, and reinstalling more than one operating system. As such I currently do not have access to World of Warcraft and I imagine I won’t for another couple days (I actually am in the process of installing it right now, which is taking longer than usual because the “Copy the Old Folder Over” method does not want to cooperate– but I won’t have time to really touch it very much for a bit, even when it is installed.)

Honestly I probably could have had this all fixed and taken care of in just a day or two, but it’s hard inbetween long work shifts!

I am still going to be on the Twisted Nether podcast tonight (note to self: install Skype) so that will be fun.

In closing, lemme tell ya… it’s surreal when you Google “WoW on Wine with Kubuntu” to make sure you’re doing it right and you are the top result.

Hunter Kindergarten: Intro to Shot Rotations – The Motion Picture

As promised, here is Pike’s Official Intro to Shot Rotations Movie!

Couple things before I begin:

1.) Kill Command is a move that you can use anytime you crit. You learn it at level 66, not level 68 like I said in the movie… sorry about the oral typo there. /blush

2.) I apologize that my voice sounds somewhat congested, my allergies are pretty terrible this time of year.

3.) My Kill Command is keybound to alt-tilde, hence the sound of a frantic jamming of keys anytime I use it.

4.) I was originally going to have a quiet background music track as well (because honestly you just can’t go wrong with The Safety Dance) but I decided it was too distracting. So hopefully just my voice by its lonesome can hold your interest. =P

Enjoy and hopefully you can learn something from this, I worry that maybe it’s not the clearest video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxLGFv1skh0&hl=en]