My Living Quarters(for toki)

Yeah, I grew up here and from the crayon on the walls you can see that(and that I'm lazy.) Note the ton of dvd's, cd's, and games. Note the ton of dust and clutter. Bottles and cans, just clap your hands...

The map below was from Ultima Online, I put it up about 10 years ago when I was playing heavily(I played it for about 7 years) and it was handy keeping track of things.

All posters are at least 7 years old, even the calendar is about 2 years old... Yes, I also use my bed as extra storage, I don't need a full queen-size to myself.

My Experiences with Patch 2.3

I hate to have 2 WoW topics back to back, but this upcoming patch is pretty big for the game overall, figure I would touch upon the stuff I found interesting.

First, Zul'aman. It starts off pretty quick, jumping right into a fight with a boss after about 3 trash pulls. He only drops one epic(and one badge of justice per person) Once you get to the trash clearing to get to other bosses, it gets annoying as hell. Infinitely respawning "scouts" that signal "reinforcements" to come and kick your ass. They wander around and have a huge aggro range. Makes backtracking or running back from ress solo a pain in the ass.

It feels different than ZG thankfully, though for the difficulty I wish they'd up the 1-epic thing. Later bosses drop 2 or 3 badges of justice per person, that's nice at least. Plus some fun hex-stick drops that can lead to money or items. With Karazhan also giving out badges of justice(I'm hearing just 1 per boss) it'll open up badge-gear to a lot of people.

Guild banks aren't active yet, neither is the season 3 gear. Badge of Justice gear is pretty nice, though the armor pieces take 60-75 badges each... Some other changes not noted in notes or vague:

• Tracking now differentiates between friendly, hostile, and npc.
• Built in tracking of helpful npcs like bankers or repairs.
• Built in Quest tracking, for new and current quests(and dailies)
• Ability to inspect talent builds for people and also inspect 3x further away
• While grouped, corpses say whose turn it is to loot them.
• Potions don't trigger global cooldown
• No more annoying "yes I'd like to purchase from you" screen.
• You see every buff your enemies have, even monsters.

There are some new daily quests, I saw some examples of them. The daily pvp quest for me was to win a match of wsg, it would give me 12 gold and 3 wsg marks...yay... The regular dungeon daily was to kill 5 trash in arcatraz for 12 gold and an ethereum prison key, not bad I guess. The heroic daily was to kill the final boss in slave pens, the reward was 16 gold and 2 badges of justice. They really need to up the gold on the heroic one, that's a lot of deaths... Didn't try the cooking daily.

I'm not even going to touch on the class balance stuff. Didn't see one in game, but videos of the engineering mount are neat. The cenarion expedition hyppogryph mounts are nice. Overall some neat changes, ones that both give some more depth to the endgame and also speed up the progress to endgame. With Zul'aman, badge changes, and new dailies it should be enough to keep the bored people happy...or burn them out even more.

Pretty Green and Blue Bars.

Ahh, being a healer in an mmorpg. As groups we clear enemy citadels and kill monsters. As large groups/raids we slay dragons, travel to other dimensions, or even kill gods. Some truly amazing sights to see and experience. Well, that's more of a guess on my part, kinda busy as a healer watching all these little green and blue bars and keep them from turning red.

They go to all that trouble making these games pretty and filled with flashy effects, your typical healer really doesn't get to see much(if any) of that. We're busy making sure that everyone doesn't die and waste all of our time and money. So instead of getting to shoot fireballs at a dragon or shove my sword through some monster's throat, we get to be the responsible ones so everyone else can do those things.

I'm not saying that healing is awful, but it's quite unrewarding. There aren't a lot of cases where you hear "that was great healing" or "wow, you saved my ass" though not totally unheard of. But everytime someone dies or there is an entire raid wipe, the healers are(normally) the first to be blamed. It's a pretty rough job since there is so little positive reinforcement.

A lot of "damage dealing" people just don't understand the complexities of healing. They swing their axe or send bolts of dark magic at the enemies and just basically do their best to do as much damage as they can, pretty straightforward. As a healer, every single thing you do could save or kill the group of people you are with. If a person shoots their bow a second too late, no real loss. If a healer is a second late on their heal, potentially everyone could die...no pressure...

When a person takes any damage, here is what typically goes through my mind(though not all apply for every situation, I'll try to keep them somewhat chronological):

• Why is this person taking damage and from what.
• How much damage did they just take in from one "hit" from whatever.
• Who else is getting hurt also.
• Who else is already hurt.
• How much healing will they need immediately.
• How many more times will they get hit and how quickly.
• How much mana do I have to cast more heals.
• Who else might need attention more than said person.
• If there is another healer, try to guess what their response will be also.
• Check mana for other healers.
• Check enemy health to estimate how long fight will last.

And those are basically just what I can think of right now that might fit, they have to be assessed nearly instantly, though some are more afterthought and overall situation analysis. About 95% of that is staring at those same green and blue bars.

Each healing class has their own style of managing their casting times, mana, actual healing output, and various special tricks that they can use only on occasion. Plus they have to factor in who is with them in the group. Luckily it's easy to remember who is with you, those bars also have names above them.

ps. I was going to mention a healing class from another game I've been playing lately, but decided to save that for another topic one day about just that game itself.