Patch 3.3 Goes Live!

Good evening. Another Tuesday, that means it’s time for an update. The big news today of course being patch 3.3 and the release of Icecrown. By now, you’ve no doubt at least started downloading the patch. But with servers being offline for an interminable amount of time, what is the rabid fan to do?

For those of you who don’t know, the man pictured above is one of my heroes: Alfred Hitchcock. Prolific director and Master of Suspense.

When Real Life Attacks
Before the WoW news, I need to talk about something personal. Friday morning, I got a call from the high school where my wife teaches. Apparently a couple of kids got into a fight, and she in true Shakespearean fashion took a hit meant for another. The boy clipped her just below the eye, damaging her glasses and giving the right side of her face a painful bruise. Minutes after receiving the call, I was out of bed, dressed, and at the school ready to fight.

We left the high school without incident, and proceeded to spend 5 and a half hours in a doctor’s office waiting room (because this is the one covered under the school’s insurance, we could’ve been seen immediately elsewhere) as I said, waited this long to find out if my wife had a concussion or any broken bones. The bruising was/is severe, and the doctor prescribed a fairly potent pain killer, Vicodin, for those with no experience this is some strong chemistry. The good doctor also left my wife with the admonition that she not return to work until the doctor has seen her again Weds. X Rays didn’t show any broken bones in the jaw or cheek, but were forwarded to the hospital for closer examination.

I’m just glad she’s alright honestly, the boys in question I don’t know. My wife tells me that one wasn’t even fighting back, and she’s not sure who it was that hit her. Only that both had been trouble makers in the past, and one had been trying to straighten out, and had been succeeding. I imagine that at the very least my wife will need to give a statement of some type, since the police got involved and both of the kids (16 year olds) have priors. For now, the word of the day is: restraint.

At any rate, thank you for indulging. I needed to let off that bit of steam.

KHAAS.news
There hasn’t been much news on this front in a while, gear reaches a point where it begins to merely trickle in. Given enough time, even the trickle stops. It’s been pretty dry for a while now honestly, it doesn’t help that we got 0 tanking drops from 25 togc (seriously, a month progressing there and not a single tanking item, I blame Someshta and the Schools).

I have made a bit of progress though on the gold front, I broke 50K this week and nearly broke 20K earned for the week (yeah, you read that right I nearly doubled my holdings). I expect that to trail off a little bit though, as I’m building up my alts a bit now and stockpiling “the new Crusader Orbs”.

THE BIG NEWS THOUGH…
I’ve been chosen by my guild to receive the first Shadowmourne! A while back I did a post about this bad boy (A Worthy Weapon – Shadowmourne). So, I’m definitely going to have my work cut out for me on this one, my buddy Rukar is going to be working on it alongside me. And I’m hoping to get Sharpobject going on this thing as well, though I doubt these two really need any help/advice from me. Even the epic version Shadow’s Edge that you get early on is a great weapon, so at the very least I hope to get all three of us kitted out with this axe ASAP. Then the real work can begin: crafting the Legendary.

In the end, Tier 9 was actually pretty good to me. I managed to finish the tier as the top geared DK tank (according to wow-heroes) on the server. Some friends managed to make a solid showing too, Crackalaks and Röthgär (jeez I hate funky letters) of Busch League took 2nd and 4th respectively. And Deathfuzz of Urge Overkill finished at 7th! Quite respectable considering the guy hasn’t really been tanking that long. As a special bitter/sweet note, I’d like to congradulate Crackalaks on getting his wolf from 10m Insanity. Likewise, I want to take a moment to wish the guy luck and to be safe, Crack is a military man leaving for active duty in February.

A Brief Note on Gearscore and other Rating Systems
I know there’s still a lot of ill will toward GearScore and rating sites such as wow-heroes, but I still maintain these are tools: when used properly, they can be quite helpful. For me, I use this mainly as a way to push myself to certain quantifiable goals. I keep track of my progress in relation to my friends and others on the server, since there are no other DK tanks in my guild to “compete” with. This site lets me “compete” indirectly and thereby push myself to be the best I can be.

ALT.news
I’ve refined my methods a bit, and decided finally on having 4 alchemists, 4 jewelcrafters, and have the rest of my profession slots cover the remaining gathering and crafting professions. There is some amount of redundancy in gathering professions, but this helps defer the actual gold cost of levelling these professions. Since 3.3 is here, I’ve resolved to skill up my Warrior ASAP, and begin running heroics for Triumph Emblems. My plan is to get all 10 of my guys to 80 and a full set of t9 or better before Cata, which really shouldn’t be a big problem. I’ve been leveling the remaining alts a little here and there. Cicatriz is now 72, Ghim is 66, and Infelice is 61 (almost 62). With the new dungeon rewards and what I am sure will be a renaissance in LFG, expect these guys to level quickly.

GUILD.news
With 3.3 we’ve decided to reset our EPGP pool, this gives us a clean slate to institute some tweaks to the system. We’ve also opened recruitment again, we’ve already snagged a Warrior (Arms/Protection) and we’re still looking for a Resto Druid (Preferably Balance offspec) and a Lock (Preferably Demo/Destro). Our main thing though, is trying to find people who are committed to raiding twice per week. Things slacked off in TOC and we only ended up doing Tuesday night raids, because people just didn’t want to wipe on the hard bosses on Thursday.

That said though, the guild still managed to end the tier at a server ranking of 10. Which is pretty damned impressive for only really raiding 1 night per week. We’ve been dipping back into older content, hitting up Ulduar for hardmodes. This week we got Freya down, and took a couple of shots at Mimiron hardmode. It’s fun, I’ll like it a lot better when we down it and can move on to Vez and Yogg though. (I want my Rusted Proto so bad now I can taste it)

That’s about it for this week. But I wanted to close with a question, what are you doing during the server maintenance? Obviously, I’ve been typing a fair bit. But I’ve also been playing with my dog as much as possible (it’s a really dreary Arkansas day outside) and playing one of my favorite time wasters: Plants VS Zombies. So, what do you do to keep yourself sane when you can’t play WoW?