You can’t handle the moose

As the title obviously infers, this past weekend was BLIZZCON!

This year I had a couple awesome friends chip in to get the stream for me for my birthday present, can’t wait to get my in-game mini-Deathwing pet.

Compared to last year’s event, the con wasn’t *quite* as exciting. In 2009 they officially announced Cataclysm, the monk class in Diablo 3, and unveiled progress on StarCraft 2.

This year… they revealed the fifth and final class in Diablo 3, the demon hunter. And that was about it. We all know that Cataclysm is hitting the servers on December 7th, StarCraft 2 is up and running, but other than that, there wasn’t anything terribly new and exciting.

Even if it was lacking in major headliners, it was still a blast to watch the stream.

Nameplates

Technical post for today.

Was running Sethekk Halls last night to get the Terokkar Turkey Time achievement on my priest, which would net me the Pilgrim’s Bounty meta and I noticed that enemy names and nameplates were, well, rightly fucked up as a football bat.

Tangent – Yes, I know it’s Hallow’s End time, but last Pilgrim’s Bounty I wasn’t high enough level to get in to kill Talon King Ikiss and the achievement doesn’t have any time restrictions on it, just a dress code.

Tangent to the tangent – But I have been running the Headless Horseman on my priest now that Arioch has the mount. And I’m out-DPSing a good portion of the DPS just by Smite-spamming. I don’t really have to heal Tir, so just bubble and Smite to my heart’s content. No mount yet, but I did get the helm and pet for some other achievement.

Anyways, back to what I was talking about.

Priest: Disc

So I finally logged on to my priest ALT. As in ALTERNATE character. You know, the character that is not my main. Because my mage is my main.

Now that we have that cleared up…

So I finally logged on to my priest.

I had made some improvements to my bar layout on Arioch and was planning on applying the same profile changes to Selwyn so I started by pulling everything off my bars.

Well, everything that was still there. Since all my healing is on mouseover macros, my bars looked very empty when I logged in.

Got my DAGassist all set up for my professions.

Poked through my bags to find all my extra gear.

First few hours in

AAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

*ahem*

This is not a test.

This is a real freak out reported by the Emergency Freak Out System.

I have logged in to Arioch and attempted to do stuff.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This concludes our warning through the Emergency Freak Out System.

Thank you.

The good. The bad. The WTF.

Some random thoughts on new and exciting or new and horrifying issues since patch 4.0.1. I’ll dive a little deeper in to the class-specific goodies and freak outs when I’m brave enough to actually test them out.

New character animations shown on the character selection screen.

This is kind of spiffy, but not in a “wow, that’s spiffy!” way. Just sort of “meh, that’s spiffy.”

My blood elf DK does the roar animation with what might be the blood presence graphic and then he goes in to what appears to be an unarmed combat stance – while holding Shadow’s Edge. Awkward.

Arioch appears to be casting fireball at this stage. Not sure if this is the default because he’s not specced yet or will always perform this animation.

Good?

Tabards displayed on character selection screen. And in game. Even if no tabard equipped.

This time, it’s going to be different

With patch 4.0.whatever dropping we are that much closer to saying goodbye to the world of Azeroth as we know it.

A lot of people are getting nostalgic in light of the upcoming Cataclysm (cwatididthar?) and I’m really no different.

I may not have memories of late nights in MC with drunken tanks or original Kara or the opening of AQ or anything like that, but I have been playing for a while now. Just before IQD opened up, if anyone has those dates memorized. I could look it up but I believe I’ve mentioned before that I’m lazy. Besides, this gives someone an opportunity to show off how much of a geek they really are by rattling that date off.

My first year was spent bumbling around Alliance-side. I was an embarrassment to warriors everywhere, I’m certain of it. I think I broke 100 DPS around the time I was hitting my 40s.

Then came the decision to reroll Horde and run a dedicated guild with some friends and family.

Suddenly, my outlook on the game changed.