Oh the guilt.

I love reincarnation when I am healing on my resto shaman. If I die at the fault of my own or, more likely, that of a tank, I can pop reincarnation, drink a mana pot, throw down a mana tide totem followed by a mana spring totem, refresh my mana shield, and I am good to go without having to beg some selfish druid for an innervate. But now I feel a bit guilty about it. Why? Well, my fellow shaman Stfushatner (heh) informed me that there is a price, not including the ankh:

Stfushatner: You know Jess, when you reincarnate, God kills a kitten.

Jess: Oh noes!

Please think of the kittehs.

Casting the WoW movie.

So we’ve heard that there will be a World of Warcraft movie, directed by Sam Raimi. No casting decisions have yet been announced. Of course Jessika will be in it, but who should play her? That’s easy: Aimee Mann. She’s perfect. Just look…add a pony tail, some facial tatoos, and some sexeh Ulduar plate, and it’s Jess! Ooooo…this could be a half-assed blog meme thingy! Is there anybody that could fully capture the essence of The Tree? Is there anyone with the Orcish virility of Ratshag?

Ulduar isn’t serious uldatime.

I didn’t get quite as much raiding in this week as I was out of town visiting family, but I did get a run in Saturday night, and we got Freya down for the first time. Woot! Anyways I have a couple of amusing screenshots. One is of me with Suzzy who came to heal instead of nuking that night since we were short a healer. We look quite similar. I think she must be a younger cousin or something. We’ve both been having back problems because of those silly dum dum pop maces that drop in Ulduar. I do like my Legacy of Thunder, although my Stoneguard is better for my posture.

The other screenshot is something most people will never see — Keredria dancing in human form. Oh she’ll dance in her animal and tree forms, but never human. She’s too classy for this. However my tanking was just so leet that night that she burst into dance before we started on Hodir. Heh. Actually she went AFK and someone popped some sort of item that makes everyone dance and I got a couple screenshots before she changed forms. Note my big ass mace.

WTB a tanking dummy.

By that I mean a target dummy for tanking, not tanking dumb people, or dumb tanks. Most DPS realize the utility of the target dummies for testing their rotation, but these are of limited utility for rage-based tanks (i.e., warriors and feral druids), because we generate nowhere near the rage we get when we are being beat on by a pack of trash mobs or a boss. I find that it’s better to engage one of the world elites that are roaming around Northrend, like those giants on the battlements around the Icecrown Citadel, or trash mobs in a lower level dungeon. But even then it’s not quite the same, because any mob that will hit hard enough to simulate the rage generation of a raid encounter is strong enough to kill me if I solo it. Ideally there would be a target dummy that hits as hard or nearly as hard as the mob it represents in terms of level, but doesn’t land a killing blow, but I don’t see that happening. I suppose maybe I’ll need to talk a healer into going with me, and then I can be their healing dummy.

Making Heroic Strike more heroic.

I wrote earlier about my issues with Heroic Strike. As we’ve progressed through Ulduar, threat has increasingly become an issue, particularly for encounters involving a lot of movement like Hodir. Now Cleave works very similarly to Heroic Strike, and I’ve found that I never have any difficulty remembering to use it, but I still find myself sometimes neglecting Heroic Strike. One reason why I think it’s easier (for me) to remember to use Cleave is that it provides a distinct graphical and auditory cue when it goes off. Heroic Strike is much more subtle. Now I can’t do much about changing the graphics (but see below), but I found that I could make Heroic Strike provide an auditory cue. First get yourself the Scrolling Combat Text (SCT) add-on. Modify it as you see fit, but add a custom event under SCT Custom Events. Here’s how it should look:

You can’t see the full path for the sound. It’s “Sound\Spells\CleaveTarget.wav” — the same sound as Cleave. If you want a different sound, pick one from a list of in-game sounds, or add your own. Note that I don’t have anything in the Display field. This is the text that would scroll across your screen when Heroic Strike goes off. This would provide you some graphical feedback for when Heroic Strike. If you use this option you may find it necessary to increase the scroll speed under SCT Animation, otherwise the sound will not go off for back-to-back Heroic Strikes until the text from the previous Heroic Strike is off the screen.

Where we play doesn’t feel so far away.

I play WoW at Keredria’s kitchen table. It’s convenient for tank-healer communication, and for when she wants to reach over and pat my head for being a good tank, or smack it for not trying hard enough.

Well, that’s not really true, but it feels like it sometimes.

You see, ever since Keredria got her new Mac she’s been having trouble with her vent. For reasons that she still hasn’t determined, her microphone randomly decides to pick up ambient noise even though she’s using push-to-talk. Often during a raid we can hear furious typing, something being set down on the table, sirens outside, cracking open another Pabst Blue Ribbon, or dancing in stiletto heels on the table in celebration of awesome heals (hot heels for HOT heals you know). Ok, maybe I made some of those up. Sometimes the sounds are a little ambiguous so I use my imagination. When this happens it makes Keredria very frustrated:

K: Can you still hear me?

Raid: Yes.

K: Damn it all to hell!

Heh. Actually the rest of us don’t mind. In fact we like it. Those little random sounds help bridge the distance and bring a raid that is spread across North America a little closer together. Also we can tell how many beers she’s had.

WoW wear & tear.

So last night my third headset died since I’ve started playing WoW (well, at least since I’ve started playing WoW with VOIP). This got me to thinking about the real life wear and tear of WoW (other than to our social/sexual/professional lives). For example, in addition to the clear need for me to buy headsets in bulk, on my laptop there is a crescent-shaped “stain” (for lack of a better word) where I rest the palm of my left hand while it hovers over the movement and frequently used number/function keys. If you look around your WoW-playing environment, what signs do you see that someone has spent WAY too many hours there and in Azeroth/Outland/Northrend?