The Literati of Band of Misfits

It seems that our guild is filled with writers languishing in high-paying, dead-end jobs with great benefits, and blogging has become the outlet for their frustrations. Now, you already know about Red, Elo and BB; check them out in the Worthy Blogs section. You may not know, however, about the latest kids to jump on the cool bus that is blogging.

A few weeks ago, fellow guildie Nash opened the doors on Grin and Bear Tank It, his feral blog. Nash has just entered the world of bear tanking at 80, and he’s having a blast. Drop by and show him some love, and be sure to congratulate him on his new little girl! She’s his first baby as well, so I find myself seeing me months ago in Nash, but some things seem eternal. Our lives both consist of diapers, formula, and nursery water. We both miss sleep, clean clothes, and being able to move through the house without kicking some toy that makes a noise.

It’s been said that feral bloggers are a fertile bunch, and BigBearButt, Nash and I are living proof. I suppose it’s all that animal shape shifting we do: it gives us the cool of the cat, the stamina of the bear…and the less said about the benefits of Tree Form, the better.

/flex

Anyway, enough about the OP sexual prowess of druids.

One of the guild’s darlings, Rainblossom, has also started Rain's Treehouse, and I’ll put it in Worthy Blogs as soon as she cleans up the formatting and puts up some content   /sternlook  /poke  /prod. Rainy’s a really sweet girl, so drop by and give her some words of encouragement in getting her blog off the ground.

Last but most certainly not least, my wife Hedwig has begun updating her blog, Divine Spirit. Now, I know what you’re thinking: “You don’t even have a link to your wife’s blog?! WTF?! What the hell is wrong with you?”

Wait, hear me out! Since her last post was about an attempt on Void Reaver—back in BC—I didn’t think I should embarrass her with a link to her blog that also contains the date she last updated it.

See? Now who’s the heartless bastard? /smug

Now, she's jamming on everything from life as a raiding Shadow priest to experiemental margaritas. Yes folks, she's all mine. Heals, DPS, and amateur bartender—gentlemen, you may now commence your jealousy.

So, go say hi to the gang and the missus, and be sure to grab a Red Rock with a sugar-frosted rim before you leave :)

Thoughts on The Latest Tier

Yes, yes…tanking article. I DO have a good excuse. I want to do more than discuss pulling techniques. I want to show you. So, I have Fraps, VirtualDub, and possibly the flu. I think the first two caused the last; nobody told me just how un-set-and-forget WoW videos were! There is a lot of tinkering I have to do, and that is slowing things down. Rest assured, I’ll figure it out.

On the bright side, Mat is ready to buy his second piece of tier 10 armor! Since I was wearing 232 shoulders, I felt that those might be the biggest upgrade, so I got these a few weeks ago:

Feed me, Seymour. Feed me now.

Sigh…I’ve had many a rant in guild chat about the models in Wrath.

“Let’s make these shoulders look like they’re made of scrap metal! Now, put some spikes on ‘em! Good! Now add a skull with glowing blue eyes! And some mag wheels! And some antennas with tennis balls on ‘em! Everyone will love ‘em!” /lobotomy /drool

Very little I’ve worn this expansion feels very druidic, with the exception of the Origin of Nightmares and the much-maligned Conquerer’s Nightsong Headguard. Yes, it’s very true that druids spend most of their time in forms, but that doesn’t mean that we should prefer to do so just to hide the fugliness of the gear! But I digress…

On our last trip into 25-man ICC, I won a Vanquisher’s Mark of Sanctification, so naturally I started looking at the 2-piece bonus. Up until now, there haven’t really been any ZOMG-that-is-SO-freakin’-cool set bonuses for ferals. Most of the tiers since Wrath hit have been good for kitties but a resounding “whatever” for bears. Growl cooldown decrease? Okay, but that hardly makes me want to jump and shout. Clearcasting bonus? Yawn. Most of them center around survivability. Druids, of all the tanks, have the least problems surviving. We have huge health pools, massive armor, and comparatively superb dodge in Icecrown. Where druids really fall away from other tanks is in terms of threat generation, especially snap threat. With Red and Random throwing out the Captain America shield, Sparklefarts and Disco and Decay, I have to drag my one piddly mob halfway back to the instance portal to keep full threat on it.

Druid threat just isn’t as strong and immediate as it should be, in my opinion. You see, I’m a big believer in tank equity. If I’m tanking one mob, and they have three each, to me that is a problem. I don’t feel as if I’m pulling my weight. Share the love, share the mobs, spread around those repair bills, I say. To make matters worse, we have superb DPS that can really rain it down, and my Swipe and feverish rotating of Lacerates isn’t always enough. Now, I've heard other druids commiserate with me, and others say our threat is fine. Maybe I'm a bad tank. It's certainly a possibility.

But help may be on the way. Let’s take a look at the t10 2-piece set bonus for feral druids:

Your Swipe (Bear) and Lacerate abilities deal 20% additional damage and the cost of your Rip ability is reduced by 10 energy.

Now you have my attention. A 20% damage increase? Maybe, just maybe, with this bonus I can start seeing my Lacerates and Swipes generate competitive threat when put up against analogous abilities of other tank classes. I don’t expect Blizz to finally hand me a Conseswipe, but this set bonus has real potential nonetheless. Also, much of the gear out of ICC has armor penetration on it. I’m very interested to see how that stat plays out in terms of threat. Seeing as how bears primarily generate threat through bleeds and physical damage, I can only assume it would help. I’ll do some testing in a few heroics, and we’ll see how it goes. In any event, it would be a pity if it took an endgame tier bonus to put druid threat where it should have been all along.

What Grinds My Gears

Wow, has it been two weeks since my last post? Bad me, enjoying the game and getting started with a fresh batch of students. I’ve got another tanking article on the way; I just need to add a few more things. In the meantime, I’d like to digress into real life.

I love Southern culture, even if it’s sometimes on the skids. I love being Southern. I love our food, our history, our geography. American by birth, Southern by the grace of God—hallelujah and pass the barbecue.

However, there are things that happen in my unique little corner of the land of magnolias and Lynyrd Skynyrd, things that make me wonder if the town I live and work in is built on the largest Indian burial ground ever conceived. Only that could explain the strangeness that I see. What I’m wondering is if you have seen any of this, either in or out of the South, these things that, well, grind my gears…

People who have tattoos of their own names. This is just downright mystifying. I suppose getting the name of a loved one is too risky; it’s much better to brave the outer limits of self-centeredness and get the name of a person who will never leave them, who deserves their complete and undying devotion. Or maybe this has a more basic function. If they’re too drunk or stoned to remember their names, they can simply point, and all is well. Or, if the meth lab blows up, or if they are mangled or decapitated by one of those not-worthy-of-a-tattoo loved ones, the police can identify the body. In fact, the more I think about it, the more this seems like a very useful practice for the people in my immediate area.

Pajamas outside of the house. Once, long ago, one would visit a supermarket in the South and see a usually voluminous woman wearing a housedress and slippers, herding her many kids and eliciting sidelong glances from other shoppers for her basic lack of a sense of dressing for the occasion. There used to be separation between “comfy clothes” and “clothes”, but not anymore. I’ve had students show up on the first day of class looking quite literally as if they just rolled out of bed, complete with Tweety Bird jammie bottoms and a blankie. I would never have dreamt of leaving the house like that, let alone shown up in a college classroom. I just want to be there in their alleged minds when they walk to their wardrobes, peruse and reject the items appropriate for meeting their college professors for the first time, glance down at their sleepwear and say “Yup, this works.” I want to see that thought process in action—I really do.

Testes on vehicles. For those of you who have ever wondered why some guys don’t call their vehicles a “she”, now you know. I don’t know if this is just a Southern thing or what, but this is just ridiculous: some hunk ‘o junk truck with a nice set of aluminum or plastic happy sacks swinging jauntily from the trailer hitch. And it’s almost always a true pile of scrap metal driven by someone who considers a working muffler in the same luxury category as seat warmers. I’m going to have a hard enough time trying to explain to my son about his own dangly bits, let alone the intricacies of why the Chevy rattletrap in front of us at the intersection has its own wedding tackle. If any of you have family or friends whose vehicles have not been neutered, please grab a pair of bolt cutters and help control the truck population. While it may seem cruel, you’ll find that the truck will be happier, live longer, and be less likely to roam.

Windshields used as tombstones. And while we’re on vehicles, what is up with this? This is just morbid to me. Whatever happened to the humorous or thought-provoking bumper sticker? I miss “Mean People Suck” or even “People Suck”. “Nuke the Whales” would be better than this rolling grave marker in front of me. Unless the dead person is in an urn of ashes rolling around on the back window shelf along with the stuffed animals and sun-bleached box of tissues, this isn’t a tasteful expression of honor and remembrance to me.

And that’s what grinds my gears. Back to you, Tom.