Thursday, December 30, 2010

Death Knight 301: Or, "Cataclysmicly Unholy Specs"

A little over three weeks ago, a little thing came out for World of Warcraft.

Maybe you heard of it? I guess there's some kind of dragon, too.



Oh, hey, I guess I heard a thing about that.

Part and parcel of the new expansion, in addition to Ol' DW's toothy grin as he ganks low level characters just trying to earn an honest copper, is a new "end game" - a lot of changes in the game play mechanics for Unholy Death Knights, and today, we're going to talk about how you can be good - if your group mates don't find your rotten, twisted visage of undeath handsome, well, they can at least find you handy.

As a disclaimer, you'll want to note that this is current as of December 30th, 2010 - everything is subject to change, ever, forever; it may not be like it used to be, and you'll never have Will of the Necropolis to give you a zombie 1-Up ever again. Ever.


Saturday, November 27, 2010

Dungeon Runner's Handbook: Stormwind Stockades, Redux

There are a lot of emotional posts on the internet about 4.0.3a, the end of "Old Azeroth" and missing the sights and sounds of the world knowing that when the servers came back up today, the world would be alien, and new, and the joy of exploration would sink in again.

Other people have wrote those blogs, and they've wrote them better than I could.

For me, 4.0.3a brought us "remastered" versions of old dungeons, old favorites.

But one, you see, one stood the challenge of all challenges in front of me.

The enemy of enemies; the original "Feeds On Your Tears" encounter.




Fecal Matter has suddenly exeunt a state of philosophical rendering.


Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Death Knight 101, or, "Snack and the Contractual Obligation"

Full disclosure! I do not main a Discipline Priest in World of Warcraft. I main what I feel is the stylistic opposite of that, an Unholy Death Knight.

I don't play better than any one else. I play successfully, but that's only because I'm 1/10th of a raid team that is currently 8/12 hard modes in Icecrown Citadel - my efforts are a viable contribution to the whole. I take talent choices that seem "useless" to the outside viewer. Looking and comparing my talent build to the "accepted best" I've made some silly choices too!

However, a lot of guides I see that talk about playing a Death Knight haven't quite been brought up to date for low level Death Knights just yet, so I'm going to give a once over here, talk about some of the basic ideas behind playing an Unholy Death Knight.


Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Pretty Much Just...

"OMG BLIZZARD WTF MOAR LIEK REHASH OF THE BORING AMIRITE I AM SO RITE LOLOLOLO xD"

No.

No, because no.


Sunday, November 7, 2010

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

From level 15 to 20, or, Groupthink!

In 1971, Stanford University's Professor Philip Zimbardo had a little experiment.

The experiment was intended to be a two week run, taking a pool of twenty-four volunteers (of a 75 volunteer group) to test an idea: that the inherent personality traits of prisoners and guards were key to understanding abusive prison situations.

The twenty-four chosen were then split into two camps; prisoners and guards. Guards were given clothing to define them - khaki pants, military surplus jackets, mirrored sunglasses. Prisoners were dressed in ill-fitting smocks and stocking caps with numbers sewn into them - the prisoners were not referred to by name, but by number.

Ultimately, the experiment fell apart, and was closed in the first six days because the guards took to their roles a little too willingly - while physically abusing the prisoners was outright banned, they were instructed to "promote disorientation, depersonalization, and deindividualization." If you're very interested, you can see the wikipedia article here...


I have to tell you that story, so I can tell you this one.



This is an Introduction!

Hello! My name is Snack, or perhaps Joe, but I want to welcome you to this, my blog about dungeon running.


Previously, I was given a moment of your time on the Pugging Pally blog with a guest post (here) that was pretty much a very simplified version of my views and ideas on "pugging" (joining "Pick Up Groups" to venture into dungeons in parties of five, ten, or twenty five) and how it can help make someone a better player - how tenacity and diligence in learning how to play can lead people to situations where they get better.

Because of that, I've met some really cool people, and talked a lot with them via "the twitters" and that eventually leads to the meat and potatoes content of this post.

Disco, the head priestess at Disciplinary Action and I had a conversation, that essentially boiled down to "Tanking and healing look like fun. I bet we could do it!"

And now we are.

Smile for the camera!


This here is Caluna. She's a Discipline Priest on the Medivh server, putting her square into the Ruin Battlegroup.

And last night, she hit level 15.

Hello, LFD.

The purpose of this blog is to talk about dungeons, and the myriad of things that exist in said dungeons. (i.e., dragons, gold, et cetera) - while World of Warcraft is certainly going to be a big focus, it is not the only game where you run around in dungeons killing monsters and gathering items for resale in your nearest town - though, any more, it feels as if the "dungeon exploration" niche of RPGs is getting ever smaller.

I'd like to talk about those games as well, games like Etrian Odyssey or Shiren the Wanderer, Torchlight or Nethack that wear their dungeon crawler tags with pride; though, I probably will wind up talking more about WoW because I hear there's some sort of thing happening with that soon? Where there may be some sort of cataclysmic changes?

Well, if there's anything we'll do, it's face them, head on.

That's what us adventurers do, you know.