Elkagorasa the Casual

Shopping at the mall the other day, this lock needed a suit, and saw this line of clothing. I couldn't help thinking, "That would look great for a trip to Blizzcon!" Oh well!

Saresa recently posted a blog detailing her favorite 5-man instances. Instances that clicked for her on one level or another. Unfortunately, one of her fav's is one of my least favorites. That's why I'd throw out this. Elk's Least Favorite Dungeons. 5. Scarlet Monastery - This was probably my first at-level dungeon. Um, maybe, Elk was dragged through several as he was growing up. What I do remember about this is, lots of scare-dee-cat humans. They always run around and aggro all their friends. Now on my level appropriate healer, I am stuck. I don't want to queue up for another dungeon, just to wipe on that first room, yet again. From SM:Graveyard to the graveyard in 3 minutes. 4. Gundrak   - Snakes. It only happened once, but doesn't take much more. My first time running this dungeon, we pugged one additional DPS spot. Yes, I was a noob, yes, I was in ilevel 200 gear, much in need of an upgrade. (TG for RDF!) The pugged DPS (a druid, IIRC), didn't l...

BBB then Fulgaris started reviewing their UI for functionality. BBB is a clicker, Ful is a button masher. Me? Well I don't know, both(?) Since, I haven't really reviewed my recent UI changes since last year , I thought I'd also contribute. Here's is my raiding UI! My Raiding UI as seen from my HP2509 My design premise: Minimize my eye movement on screen. I read a forum post reviewing eye focus. It stated that it typically takes 0.2 to 0.5 seconds for your eye to focus on something different. (to find at button, click, then refocus could take 1.5 seconds) To minimize my eye movement, I've placed myself and my target immediately at my feet. (Stay out of that green gooey stuff). Spell timers are immediately visible on my target. Remove clutter . I removed Necrosis as it's functionality wasn't adding anything to me. I removed all additional bag buttons as I only needed to click one to see contents. One version, I was having a button bar disappear w...

I hadn't seen it before, until I searched specifically for it. Festergut's gaseous attacks are not poison, like I had thought, but actually shadow damage. This means that you can avoid a lot of damage, especially at the start of the fight, by maintaining a Shadow Ward on you. It could make sense to even roll it into your spell rotation as it's cooldown coincides with it's length, 30seconds. This trick is mentioned in the Flu Shortage achievement comments.

I recently subscribed (personal birthday present) to the World of Warcraft "official" magazine . Since it only comes out quarterly, I received my first copy this week. Quite impressed with the quality so far; writing is well done, lots of high quality pictures and art and relevant articles. This issue even has a short post on the difference of dragons, drakes and proto-drakes. bombing sketti eggs The first article in this issue was an interview with the Quest Dev team. They discuss their developmental process, some of their heartaches and troubles. They brought up when new employees join the dev team they do not get GOOD examples of quests, they provide quests NOT to model. They specifically pointed out the Outland quest Fire over Sketties . Basically, the monsters have like 5 abilities to disable you in 5 different ways, and they'd knock you off your mount so you'd take durability damage. It was horrible. (Luis Barriga) Their second example was the quest ...

an underwater mount! I went out questing again last night in Vash'jir , the new Cataclysm water-zone. They had reset all my quest heads, so I was able to complete a previously bugged quest. This time, I was carried away by a naga into the depths. " You'll make a nice specimen... ". Without spoiling anything, you need to make sure you make it through these opening quests. As I mentioned in my previous post, there are upgrades, and you get a cool mount. (If you or your kids watch Phineas and Ferb , you'll have an idea what this mount is.) This opens up a new quest hub that you work in. As I quested, I played around with my Destro spell rotation, until I came up with this: Bane of Havoc - instant cast Curse of Elements - instant cast Corruption - instant cast Immolate Fel Flame - Instant cast and buffs damage on Immolate, works as great filler before Conflag can be used. Very little damage done. Conflagerate Incinerate This is a fairly quick spell r...

I think I found my first upgrade in Cataclysm. It was in the game chat, but I couldn't believe it when I read it. It's called the Sishir Spellblade of Wildfire. Here are the statistics: I am considering using this instead of my Quel'delar Lens of Mind . Ouch! Seems crazy, to go from an epic quest line item, to a quest drop that looks like is a board with a nail splitting it. Hoping this is one beta green drop that get's its stats changed before production. Before After dagger quest drop from game.

If you attempted to check out this site on Friday afternoon, you would have been presented with a generic, spam-centric website. No, I had not been hacked. My free-DNS provider, is charging me to manage this domain. Another $11/year to maintain a domain with them, when you have hosted 5 other domains prior. If I wasn't hosting a domain for my wife with the same DNS provider, I'd probably take the down time and flip it over to someone else.

RestoDude asked how I , a Warlock , would help my healer. It's not until I played my Priest alt, that I realized just how intensive some fights can be on healers. Even when I am not directly being attacked or standing in the fire, I am still taking a bit of splash damage, heck, Life Tap is glyphed , so always on my spell rotation. They may have the niftier tools for healing, but still have to juggle their own cooldowns, and spell cycles. Ok, as we all know warlocks are not that versatile of a class. We have the DPS build (lots of dots), and that other, um DPS (tanking) build and one more DPS (pyromaniac) build. Healing isn't on that list. We're actually quite flagrant with the usage of health, stealing another's then using it to create our own home-brewed mana. Tasty! Does this personal addiction to organic mana help our healers? Heck no. I've had 5-man healers get mad at me for tapping (and some "enablers" that say go for it, but they're probably a...

I spent more time in the Cata beta the other night. Logged on too late for the raid. Earlier this week, Blizzard pushed out another patch and it appears to have added a nice bit of content. Found that they fixed the trainer bug, so I was able to train into my entry level warlock spells. Soul Burn, Soul Harvest and two others. Playing around with SoulBurn , I realize I don't know enough about what spells this buff. SB + Summon Pet = instant pet (fka fel domination ) was what I ended up playing most with. Hey, let's get out bluey to tank this guy, hey, let's grab my felpuppy. I do love that Soul Harvest also heals. It's like a mini-meal, food and soul-shards in a single spell. Outside that, I was oohing and ahhing some of the UI changes I've spotted recently. Quest items are highlighted in my bags. They have a yellow halo around them. Makes them super easy to spot. Makes it great when going to vendor my grey items, that I don't accidentally sell those items....

Back in April 2009 , I had started a blog to talk about my in-game exploits. I had found that my personal website was taking a lot of flak due to 'gaming' posts and moved content over here. As time moved on, I found blogger ideal for hosting and have remained here ever since. In this 200th post instead of posting specifically about WoW, I thought I'd take a few moments a detail some of my lessons learned over the last 16 months. (If you're not thinking about starting your own blog, the rest of this post may be boring or it might give you insight into me, the author... you've been warned.)

Felruk and I have 20 more arena battles under our belts and things are changing, slowly. Unfortunately we are still only wining 30% of our fights. The fights we win are typically the battles where they attack him first. This week was devastating. Typical fight is about 2 minutes long. We had 2 or three fights this week, where I died within the first 10 seconds. Yes, I am a clothy and I have less than 30,000 health, but when the melee dps doesn't focus on me, I can outlast Felruk. Improvements: incoming chaos bolt  Felruk and myself have improved our communication. We still aren't coordinating our efforts to take out specific combatants, but better. Hmm, raid icons? I'll ask him to mark them next week. Destruction is working nicely, in that it provides me a few escape mechanisms. In addition, I was able to do a nice killing shot using Chaos bolt. wwhhiiizzzz, drop! Sadly my Fears take longer to cast. Both of us picked up a new piece of equipment, he still hasn...

Last night after the raid, I logged into the Beta realm and swapped to my Affliction build. I spent some time questing in Hyjal, so I could play with Soul Swap . This tier-4 affliction talent, requires 15 points in the affliction tree and 1 point in siphon life. Leveling, you could pick this up at level 39. You instantly deal ??? damage, and removing your damage-over-time effects from the target. For 20 sec afterword, the next target you cast Soul Swap on will be afflicted by the damage-over-time effects and suffer ??? damage. You cannot Soul Swap to the same target. 6% of base mana, 30 yd range, Instant cast Grinding through closely packed mobs, currently appears to be the ideal situation for this spell. Since it does so little (if any) damage, this spells is a great closer (aka destro's shadowburn ?) for mobs. This spell in some aspects takes the place of your Drain Soul, except that it does not damage over time. Here's how I've been using it: At ~10% health of ...

I copied Elkagorasa over to the Beta realms around the end of July and he's gotten about 8 hours game play total. A family vacation to visit Mickey Mouse in the middle sort of put a damper on his time. 3 hours game play over the weekend. Unfortunately he is still level 80. I have been leveling as Destruction, even though it was the build I intended as my PVP build. Here's my initial reactions: Due to the build mechanics, I am casting soul fire with every spell rotation. It has a long cast time (almost 5s?). Rotation is : curse, bane, curruption, Soul Fire, Immolate (typically a dead mob), conflag, inc spam.  Trainers are still not talking to me, so I haven't been able to try out the soulburn mechanics. I am hoping that I'll be able to train when I hit level 81. My goblin and worgen haven't had any trainer related issues. Random Dungeon Finder won't let me queue. I had an issue before Disneyland that prevented me from queueing, now that's been fixed, b...

Sure, "Old World" is changing and all, but nobody ever talks about the changes to Dalaran coming soon. Yeah, I know, it's a floating city and all, it COULD split down the center and dragons come flying out of it. (Hmm, maybe that IS why it's flying??) Anyway, with the coming Cataclysm, it will soon be a ghost town, like, well, Shattrath . (more after video) As I start packing my bags and calling the movers, I ran around and grabbed a few snapshots of old friends. Like... "Aunt" Sarah Brady -  the forgotten member of the family. Hugh let's her moonlight here. The TMNT crew - Splinter consulting with Leonardo, Donatello, Michaelangelo & Raphael Applebough - the vendor that cannibalizes itself for you. Sith Lord Land'alock - the quest giving pirate Breanni - co-conspirator w/ my pet trading ring. Lastly, but not least... Marcia Chase - who's always willing to show you her goods So, who's going sign yo...

Blizzard has pushed down a new beta client that changes the launcher/patching functionality. This has some excellent potential for future growth of the game. 4gb into a 16gb beta client download and I can "play" The patches are given prioritization. The important stuff (bug fixes) to play the game is pushed down first. Filler stuff comes second, and pure fluff (hi-res graphics, sounds, etc) are pushed down last. This means you can start playing sooner when a patch is pushed down. I tested it Friday morning and was pleasantly surprised. At 16% completed, I was able to start playing the game. I logged into Orgrimmar and was able to fly around while the game was still downloading and installing. Even better, I was able to play in Ultra resolution with full screen (1920x1240?) and didn't notice a difference.   Other beta observations: Questing is even easier than before. I have reached level 7 on a goblin hunter and I am basically flying through the content. Tempor...

If you, like me, have at least one PC set with the Blizzard background configured, you'll like this script. I've placed the script in my Startup folder and it will randomly download a new Blizzard approved wallpaper image each time you start your Windows XP/Vista/7 computer. I've linked to this before, but I recently posted a newer version of this script to include Fan Art and some random functionality. You will still need to modify the script to fit your size monitor. Edit the code in Notepad and it should be fairly obvious (Note look for two sizes of art, the fan art sometimes comes in different sizes than Blizzard images). Script is here

Reading Blood Pact , I see they are more than open on posting blog posts on Cataclysm Beta Warlock talents. Someone not read the NDA? Looking at the revised talent tree, I am  happy to see that I do not need to take Improved Fear, or Curse of Exhaustion in order to reach Haunt at 31 points.In a build sheet from about 2 weeks ago, you did. Didn't think these fit into the "no wasted points" philosophy. Anyway, a cool affliction talent  I am looking forward to testing is Soul Swap . One of my biggest complaints about leveling as an affliction lock is the slow ramp time of our dots. Tons of mana spent, and it takes 3x longer to kill beasts as they run at us. The talent will require 15 points in the affliction tree, so easily obtainable by any level 80 warlock who is running affliction.   lvl 80 cata afflock build (31/0/5)