Blizzard needs to nerf earthquakes, or the class that uses them, the earth, to the ground, baby! Amirite? If they dont do this, I am going to reroll my life.

Blizzard released the 3.0.8 patch notes. In it, and the other rumblings of the blogosphere (the modern day chicken entrails,) I have seen the following bits that interest me, and therefore, you. These are in no particular order (or, are they?)

Nine spells have had a bug-fix whereby the ‘correct damage modifires will be applied to the spell based on the target’s creature type.’ This bug-fix was applied to four classes, Druids, Paladins, Priests, and Warlocks; however, only one class has a talent that increase their damage against spicific opponents, Paladins:

Crusade will now interact properly with:

• Judgement of Blood
• Judgement of the Martyr
• Judgement of Command

Druids have no such talent, and yet Entangleing Roots got the same treatment, as did the Priest’s Shadow Word: Pain, and the Warlock’s Corruption, Haunt, Soul Siphon, and Unstable Affliction.

As I said, I can see the future, and I see; nothing. All these spells changed because they all share similar coding. Could Blizzard introduce creature spicific damage bonuses in the future? Absolutely. Will they? Maybe, but these bug-fixes dont indicate that. Like Mystic Chicancery said, any assumption that this indicates anything is ‘crazy talk.’

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Clams can now be opened while sitting (read, eating and drinking,) and while mounted (taxi or normal.) Some may scoff, and others even bitch about how other more important things should be fixed, but I always welcome ‘quality-of-life’ changes to the game.

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Apparently, we didnt unlearn the old Paladin talent, Precision. It has been hotfixed, along with several other talents that were removed/merged. Basically, Im loosing chance to hit; RAAAGE!

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The official patch notes were written by a 4 year old, or someone with no time at all. Here is what they said about Entangling Roots.

Entangling Roots: When determining if a new Entangling Roots should overwrite an old one, and will now calculate the correct damage modifiers for the creature type of the target.

Now, it sounds like to me, that there are two parts to that. One, as I discussed above, is a big fix to another spell entirely that made sense there too. The other is one a friend of mine noticed. So, S, if your listening, I dont think you should be having a hard time re-rooting after 3.0.8! Yay!

Lots of cool profession changes are incoming. Here is one that interested me.

Jessica Sellers, a new vendor in the Dalaran inscription shop, will sell most inscription inks for the cost of one Ink of the Sea. She also sells Snowfall Ink for multiple Inks of the Sea.

Inscription never made sense to me, because it doesent scale. Take Glyph of Spiritual Attunement, for a Paladin Tank, thats about as required as they come, aggree or not, but the point is, its a level 18 glyph. To make it, you have to have one Midnight Ink, and one Light Parchment, the Midnight Ink requires two Dusky Pigment, which you get from milling Mageroyal, Swiftthistle, Briarthorn, Bruiseweed, or Stranglekelp, all low level herbs. But the glyphs that are made are required at all levels of play. And because Glyphs are not permanent, anyone from level 18 to 80 may need a new Glyph of Spiritual Attunement at any time. This scaling schema makes no sense, and there is no corrolary to any other profession. Now, you will be able to use your Ink of the Sea (made from Azure Pigment, milled from Northrend Herbs) to trade down to the Inks you will need. No more requirement for you to go herbing all over this world and the next to get the proper pigments. Its a crappy solution to a stupid problem, but its a solution.

Next up, Jewelcrafting, looks like we are getting our Brilliant Glass for WotLK, its called Icy Prism, and instead of 3 of each of the green gems, it will require 3 of the purple, blue, and green (color, not rarity) gems, and a Frozen Orb, early reports suggest it will drop at least 2 of the blue (quality, thats Autumn’s Glow, Forest Emerald, Monarch Topaz, Scarlet Ruby, Sky Sapphire, and Twilight Opal) gems, and has a chance for a 3rd, is also has a small chance to drop a Dragon’s Eye. I wonder what we are supposed to do with surpluses of the other three green gems.

In Mining news, we will only have to tap the mine node once, instead of multiple times. Call it quality-of-life, ultimately, its better this way, but I do admit, I will miss being different than herbalism. (I suppose the secondary benefits of herbalism, mining, and skinning will have to do.)

To me, its actually elegantly simple. This may well come from a long time spent tanking, but its how I perceive it. To me, whenever I want to improve myself, it is so I can spend more attention on this one thing. What is it?

Situational Awareness.

WoW has a metric tonne of stuff going on, and that’s when things are going according to plan! When a standard ton of do-do hits the industrial sized fan, you have to be aware of even more. If you are capable of cultivating this awareness, everything else, in my opinion, can be taught.

The first step to solving a problem is to state the problem. If you have no situational awareness, you have no idea that there is even a problem. When I try to improve my skills, even something completely unrelated to my awareness of the game, (like trying to figure out which is most effective against one target, Crusader Strike or Divine Storm?) I do so so that I can spend more of my time devoted to perceiving the virtual environment, and widening my situational awareness.

Players without this awareness are the type to stand in really bad spots, or they move when they shouldn’t. But outside just positioning, they either blow their cooldowns to early or too late, or not at all, they might as well be machines.

Obviously, some classes require this situational awareness more, and some less, but that doesn’t mean one can do without. And before you ask, no amount of study of a strat can replace it. Because I value it so highly, it is why I cannot stand people who watch TV and play or even play other games while playing.

Situational awareness, get some. Now you know, and knowing is half the battle.

Except GI-Joe is wrong, its the whole frikken battle!

Ding!

And this post was directed to a particular person, you know who you are, mostly because you are my only reader… Did you sign up to Blog Azeroth yet? No? Quit beating the obese and get on it!

Ive been quiet about my ordeal, but I think it is time for this story to be made public, but I warn you, some of the images and reenactments you are about to see may be distressing to some viewers.

First, we have to cover the tragedy that started this whole thing in motion. You see, my computer broke. At the time, this reporter was unaware of the true scope of the tragedy. Some sources quoted me as saying there was magic smoke, other sources did not. What I really said, based on the remains was, “My god, their must have been smoke.” At the time, I had no idea how right I was. You see, the English, jealous of my good teeth, stole my computer, and did evil things to it, only to return it later without my knowledge. (No doubt they were in league with the underpants gnomes, and that is how they got in and out so stealthily.) I wouldn’t believe me either, but after long and extensive archival research, I was able to uncover this archival footage of the incident that day. Sadly, the massive loss of Bothan life could not be avoided, (they are too delicious.)

It was either that, or this…

And after the filming of that degrading piece of filth, my computer committed suicide.

Either way, I blame Gnomes (underpants or otherwise.)

From the point it became clear my computer was lost to me, I became distraught, despondent, and otherwise dis-something-a-whosit. My dear brother went out of his way, and bought me a whole new computer.

There were some… http://inspiredogre.blogspot.com/2008/12/twit-i-am-so-mad.html, with the delivery, and though UPS delivered on time after all, I make no apologies for any of my words or actions. (Incidentally, you can totally blame me for the crappy “What can brown-and-bloody do for you?” ad campaign, I went a little overboard with the stabbing.)

However, budgets being what they are, the video card I had was, less than suitable. But I did learn something. When the login-dragon laughs at you in 1 FPS, just don’t log in, turn back around, and get a new video card.

So, I did, and now, I am sitting high and happy, ready to play as soon as I get home this morning.

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DAMNIT!

And here is my Death Knight, Luduex.

And me as a mage, Luduz.

And the token hunter, required for me to blog, Ludeul. (Careful, she has crabs.)

Real post inc…

Q u o t e:Anyone else get a mental picture of a half naked GC in a room full of strippers and blow, excusing himself to ‘check on his crew’ at the closest computer?

Q u o t e:I see him sitting in a dark room around a large round table of devs who sit there and conspire how to nerf priests and make us bow to our dps overlords

It’s actually a beach with sand the color of cookie dough where mysterious ladies bring mixed drinks and blow sand off my laptop keyboard. The drinks have names so full of vowels that I can’t pronounce them. When it rains, the wifi goes down so nobody can post and everybody dances. You can hear the little pink crabs tiptoeing down at the waterline and the splash of coconuts that fall from the palms and there are no mutilate spec rogues on the entire island.

Or maybe that’s the gin talking.

It whispers: nerf me.

Good night!

BTW, this post was not sarcastic! To my wide, and varied audience, how do you see GC?

So, the ‘Rule of Cool.’ I have not done my due dilligance, I am afraid, to find out who coined this phrase, but I first heard about it through Chatty’s DnD Blog, the post is here. (I wasent even reading his blog when he posted it the first time, and thus, it is a re-run.) Now, Chatty got it from here, a site called TV Tropes.org, which discusses much of the same stuff I have been discussing when I talked about Chekhov’s Gun and the Unreliable Narrator. Recently, he made another post about it here, I guess there are some people out there who think the Rule of Cool is uncool.

(In case you were curious, as I was, what is a Trope? Well, according to Wikipedia, a Trope (in literature,) is a “…common pattern, theme, motif in literature, or a figure of speech in which words are used in a sense different from their literal meaning.”)

I will be exploring TV Tropes.org in more detail in the future, I am sure Ill be posting my nerdgasms here. But back to the Rule of Cool.

The Rule of Cool is easy to understand. According to TV Tropes, “The limit of the Willing Suspension Of Disbelief for a given element is directly proportional to its degree of coolness. Stated another way, all but the most pedantic of viewers will forgive liberties with reality so long as the result is wicked sweet and/or awesome. This applies to the audience in general, as there will naturally be a different threshold for each individual in the group. “

In DnD, we use this rule all the time, anyone who says otherwise clearly does not understand our hobby. We sit around a table, and play make-belive with eachother! Without the Rule of Cool, we would all surely laugh at ourselves.

As I said, there is some argument about the Rule of Cool. I belive that the people who are disagreeing with Chatty are doing so for the wrong reason. They arent against the Rule of Cool, they are against Chatty’s implimentation of it. To them, gritty, hard, and rules-driven is cool, and thats cool!

Im not joining the flame-fest, all I am interested in is; how do I use the Rule of Cool? For me, its all about being adaptable. I do not have any control over my players, (I want a cookie, it takes a man to admit that.) They will do whatever they want, and it will be different than what I expect. In order for my responses to be cool, I have to accept that they wont do what I want, and plan accordingly. How do you plan for the unplannable? Dont plan at all.

The number one tool of a good DM is improvisation. You have to be able to improvise on the spot. Those improvisations have to be cool. If your upset that your super-cool-construct is unusable, your improvisations will suffer.

So, when I make an adventure, I state to myself the goals, I limit myself to 3 or 4. These are the things that I want to achive. When I write, I would then plan a beginning, middle, and end, in whatever order I wish, and write. But when I DM, I dont plan that rigidly. Instead, I create or research the creatures and characters involved. For combat opponents, this means reveiwing and understanding their abilities, (and often, tweaking them.) For NPCs, this means an understanding of their goals, personality, and capabilities.

Once I have that done, I imagine a few cool scenes or encounters. Sometimes, for more traditional adventures, this involves making a floor-plan, for a dungeon or something, but for less linear adventures, this means imagineing these scenes and encounters as sort of rooms, I create more than I need, and come up with a guideline for the rules I would need to run those scenes or encounters. (Often, there are none, Role-Play wins over Roll-Play with my group, every time.) After that, I write it down, and do not put them in order. I am a very structural guy, I tend to get caught up in the idea that things have to happen in certain ways. So, to force myself to be on my toes, I do not put these scenes and encounters into any order whatsoever, its up to the players to navigate, not me.

Every time I DM, my players will hit on some of my pre-made scenes and encounters, avoid others, and go in entirely different directions. Here is where Chekhov’s Gun meets the Rule of Cool. The players have taken a hostage, rather than fleeing the city, like I expected. It was a cunning plan, the hostage would logically hold back the town guard. Now, we are at an impasse. I had no plan for this. But, I did plan for the players to meet a recurring villain, Lord Kallinfruend. I cant let that not happen, he is the Gun! But, Rule of Cool dictates that the player’s cool action (taking a hostage,) has to give them results. But, here is the cool part. As a DM, cool is not always equal to success. Failure can be cool too, so long as that failure imparts more cool into the story.

“A bolt flies from a window in the corner of the warehouse, striking the princess in the breast with a sickening thud, she doesent even scream as she slumps, dead, in your bindings. Your eyes follow the bolt’s path, and in the window, in black leather, is Lord Kallenfruend, smirking at you. The Lord-Knight is not nearly as honorable as he made you belive!”

I planned Kallenfruend to be an implacible, but honorable enemy. Plans have to be malliable. Kallenfuend is not at all what he seems. And thats cool. The players are forced to flee the city after all, and they have a new villain. They may be upset, mad even, that their plan failed, but it is still very cool that their enemy has proven to be a true villain!

(And before you ask, my players would so totally take a princess hostage, they are just those kinds of people.)

BTW, I have had just about ENOUGH of Blogger. I cant cut-n-paste the way I want, the blogger editor does not properly maintain formatting, especially when I use bullet lists. I’m at my wit’s end!