And if I could, I'd make a deal with God...

It's insane how fast trolls proliferate on the web...

Case in point... I mean, come on, can't people leave the ass hat behind for just a little while? There really aren't enough of us gamers to be this cruel and insensitive...

Which reminds me of a sad bit.

Melvin is a bit liberal. (O.K., he's a lot liberal...) He really hates the Iraq war. Part of this is personal. One of his childhood friends... a guy he grew up playing D&D and Axis and Allies with... died in Iraq last year. Patrick Wade, a naval explosives expert, killed while attempting to disarm a roadside bomb.. prob one of those Iranian models that started showing up in late '05.

Thersa reason Melvin and I hang out, despite my crappy attitude, and his rampant.. er... melvinism. We're all in this together, so, ya know, cut each other some slack, eh?

Um.. so work decided to block blogspot... or rather, the private company that does security decided to block blogspot... we raised a fuss, and it's back for now... no idea how long tho...

And a response to Sonvar... yeah, last post was kinda brutal. I keep hoping Arms & Fury would do a post on doin arena with Melvin, but it aint in him, I guess. He was getting pretty peeved at Pog, the world's worst warrior, tho.

Problem with RL friends getting up to speed with things like arena... our friend Sugars has a new 70 lock. (well, not too new at this point...) But he's never really done the whole... what does this talent do? (respec) what does this talent do? (respec) thing. He probably should, and has been makin noises about goin destro.

Leavin Melvin and co out of the scene for a bit.. cuz they really are incorrigible. I mean, really... a priest in arena that doesn't see the point of mana burn?

But Sugars came to 70 under Arms & Fury's wings. Now... my current predicament.... Ima control freak. I've run pretty much every character class up to at least 30. Have the three 70's (Mage, Hunter, Shammy)... and two 60's (Priest, Rogue) that I quit playin well before B.C. I look at talent trees for classes I'm never gonna play, and try to figure out how to beat em. I listen/read what these classes bitch about, etc...

Sugars doesn't quite have this background... and that leaves a lotta training required to brink him up to speed. The first rule of fight club... doan talk about fight club. Er... the first rule of arena... fight like you would in a BG and you will lose.

The problem in this case... Arms & Fury is still a bit down the learning curve himself. So his druid and sugars the lock were doin 2v2... and I expected Arms&Fury to learn a bit more about druid in arena, and to teach Sugars about lock in arena.

A month after the 3v3 starts, I find out that Sugars didn't have an arena frames unit add-on, and Arms & Fury knew this...

Its like goin raiding without mana pots or buffs. Not completely lethal, but your gonna be a burden for others. Specially a lock. I think this is part of Arms & Fury's myopia with the druid, one I've been trying to break. We've been using him on the team as a utility player... cc and healing when needed, dps otherwise. However... he's a warrior at heart, and warriors get tunnel vision, as Braids would put it. One target til its dead or apparent that itsa waste of time... the multi targeting of an arena addon is less vital to this world perspective...

However... an SL/SL lock has to dot the crap outta everything, including enemy pets. The more Siphon lifes she has up, the better her chances of not getting gibbed. Sugars NEEDS this addon, lika hunter needs pet chow.

BTW... a coupla of ya might not know what ima talking about. Theresa coupla addons... Arena Frame Units is what i use, and I've heard Proximo is even better. The addon puts a nice little window on yuir UI, like the party screen... cept populated with the enemy. You can click on the window, and target an enemy, even if they're outta LOS. It keeps (kinda) current with the life/mana of each, so you can switch targets and focus easily... plus it gives you immediate info on what you face... showing buffs, etc, so you can figure out if the missing stealth enemy isa druid (by the marks of wild on the other team) ora rogue. Or, what kinda lock yuir facing by the diff lock buffs... or what kinda hunter... (death to spirit bond BM builds!)

Fer a lock, spamming on Dots while keeping a healer feared, this add-on is vital.

So last week, I kinda got mad at both of them. I felt that they weren't making enough of an effort to get good at arena, and thus pretty much wasting my time. We were doin the 3v3 games, Arms & Fury would get killed, and rather than stay and watch, and learn and help critique, he'd bug outta the match. The second we got out, he'd requeue, rather than sit for a second and talk about what went wrong vs what went right.

I mean... I really got upset. Arms & Fury and Sugars aint Melvin. I have higher expectations from them.

Its getting better now tho. Arms & Fury finally broke out his warrior and is trying to show Sugars how to survive against the anti-warlock class. Hopefully this will help A&F learn how to help keep Sugars alive in the arena as well. A&F had been playing with Sug for months, and never got around to explaining the ins and outs of how warriors get around fear... so poor Sugars had been having a rough time of it.

The other big thing has been A&F and Sugar's complete terror of rogues. Now, a lock is more or less rogue bait. But I fail to see how a class build that has 18k armor AND innate nature resistance should give a crap about rogues. Last weekend, A&F finally beatdown his first rogue. I expect more of this notable behaviour in the future...

Which leads to THE POST. Again... I've been hoping for a post by A&F on team melvin. Nope. Or on learning to stop being afraid and love teh rogue. Nope. But midway through our 30 games last weekend, I was checking out A&F's char. Now... it's not that his gem choices are just bizzare. (they are) It's not that he has the fashion sense of a cuban drug dealer... (he does) but still... his spellcaster druid had a +melee crit gem... and it took me a minute to decide whether or not this was on purpose, or an accident.