Mourneblade

Steven Brust's latest book came out in paperback yesterday. I picked it up after lunch and, two hours later, have almost finished it.

He's a wonderful author. He writes mostly fantasy, but he employs a lot of very nice tricks. And he works hard on continuity, which is always a problem with series.

I read too fast. I can down 400 pages in about two and a half hours, more if it's dense material, less if it's pulp fiction. I noticed some time ago that I tend to slow down when reading decent books... to make it last longer. Notice the use of "decent." I'm not sure if I can call books "good" anymore. I classify them as "decent" or "trash." A sub section of the second category is "my kinda trash." Laurell K. Hamilton used to be in that category before she dropped to soft, and then hard core porn masquerading as vampire horror.

Anyway, the Vlad Taltos series by Brust has an interesting take on the whole Michael Moorcock inspired soul eating weapon thing. I won't go into the details, but there is a reason I'm mentioning it.

I found the price I'll put on my WoW soul.

I'm gonna respec 0/41/20 MM sometime soon. I can't handle BM's lack of control anymore. I must have scattershot, silent shot, and hawk eye.

What brought me to this point? Playing Majeure, my mage.

My 67 mage was running around AV all weekend. This, gentle reader, you already know. I ended up with over 20k honor for the weekend. And Maj was kicking ass.

I spent most of the time on defense. And once, one magical moment, I caused an alliance wipe on Drek that saved the game.

If you are still reading at this point, if you didn't turn away in shock and disgust upon reading of my impending respec... well, you will need a stronger stomach now, my friends...

Melvin taught me all I know about AV. And I wiped em the Melvin way... Deep fire has a wonderful aoe stun spell. Blood elf mages have a very useful aoe silence... I snuck into the frostwolf keep when the allies had drek at 55%. A coupla hordies were ahead of me, and managed to take out the allies guarding the doorway... so when i came around the corner, and found all the healers and half the ranged dps in one batch... well..

Dragons breath (no heals for 3 sec)
count to 3...
Blast wave (some stuns)
Aoe Silence (2 secs)
... maj dies...

But I got to watch, as drek killed off his tanks during the silence, then began working his way down the threat chart...

And then I realized... I'd been doing the equivalent of leveling a holy spec priest... MM hunter is the pvp build. It has spells that reward skill far more than those in BM do. BM is far more effective in raiding... but simple damage doesn't cut it anymore.

Why do I feel so empty?

It happened...

Guild broke, silent in the night...

All the original core left, to found a new guild... from Army of Eternity to Veterans of Eternity.

I really wasn't the catalyst...

Definition:
Wisdom: Seeing the mountain of crap approaching, and realizing that you've been in this situation before...

"Hey, that's a mountain of crap!"

When a guild that considers itself a hard core raiding guild (well, not really, but casual, "serious" about raiding...) has to spam general in Nagrand to PUG for Gruul's... it's damn over.

Mabd is now in Noctumbulant. God save me, I've joined a mispelled guild :(

Majeure is homeless until 70, when I hope to hop her to Noct. Noct is gonna be my first experience with hard core pvp.

K... this weekend was AV honor holiday. And with the proposed changes to AV in 2.3, it was busy. If you are unaware... AV honor holiday is more or less honor welfare. An epic item runs from 11k to 17k honor. (Boots, bracers or belt...) These items are MUST haves. You will not find better till after kara, for the most part. Low in dps stats, ton of sta and resiliance. Since my mage is going with Spellfire and Spellstrike sets... which have next to NO sta, I'll really need the boots and bracers from BG.

So... 11k for epic bracers. How much honor can you get from AV in a game during an honor holiday?

500-800. And it takes no more than 20 min. So... Majeure made 12.5 honor on saturday, and 6k on sunday. I doubled her lifetime kills, and almost managed to go from neutral (0) to revered with the Frostwolf faction on saturday ALONE. (I passed out... I'm weak...)

As of monday morning, Maj is halfway to exalted.

Just to understand how big a deal the AFK thing was... Melvin would play a ton of games back before the anti-afk stuff started. Since his computer is near his TV... he would eat and watch while quasi-AFKing. His record for a weekend was 35k honor.

So... the new changes should put a stop to all this... OTOH... it seems that there will be new BG dailies... with rewards of up to 4k honor each. (Two are currently available...)

Maj did just fine against most of the 70's. However... not so hot against the bosses... Vann and Bal kept resisting my spells, and when I hit it was for half damage :(

Time to level the little killer some more!

EDIT: It appears, according to WoWInsider, that the 4k honor per daily was a blizz typo, the actual amount is 400. Less abusive, fer sure, but with season one arena gear going fer about 22-30k honor each...

Hrm... 2 bg dailies... 800, + the honor from playing... say 1k honor a day. A month a piece? Jeez...

Now ya know why I refer to gnomes as "Free Range Honor..."

In defense of Melvin...

Melvin is not an idiot.

Melvin is a n00b.

There is a difference.

The reason Melvin is the mage tank is because melvin decided early on that success in WoW depends on tons of sta and resiliance. So he has tons. and tons. and tons.

The reason Melvin prefers his shammy to his mage is because it takes longer for people to kill his shammy than his mage.

Melvin is blind to certain aspects of the game... such as kiting.

Melvin is a competant mage tank, and no other mage in the guild has close to his health...

Were I to get my mage to 70.. I'd sack the AH for +sta greens, and make a passable mage tank. It don't take much. The trinket from kara would help a ton as well... but just pile on insane +sta, and ignore everything else.

I tried to explain the roles of spell hit, reduced arcane resistance, and proper timing of fire ward for the High King fight. Melvin simply cannot play at that level. Hesa button masher... not a timer.

Counterspell is useless to him without the points that give it silence.

No one else in the guild understands these... finer points.

Melvin will never blog. He's too repressed. I pass on hellos to him, and every so often, he'll ask me... "that's going in your blog isn't it?" after my face freezes in mid conversation...

@BRK... the PUG hunter misdirected onto the wrong target. Cuz he wasn't listening... TWICE. And since the guild can't possibly do a "misdirect" phase, then a "pull" phase without sitting around with thumbs up asses long enough for misdirect to lapse...

Many is the time in Kara I wish I could say... "trap cooldown is near up, pull in next 10 seconds please..."

The problem with the guild... they'll do the high king pull right, and then NOT be able to down everything quickly enough...

But you've all asked about the response to my guild post...

Just one. The guild head said I was mostly right, then said I was being unduly negative..

K... then last night...

First, comcast sucks balls. You guys need to know this.

Second... i get home, and cable and internet are both down. I call melvin, tell him to let guild know that I'm out for the night.

Melvin tells me that the officer's forum has a huge post fest on the breakup of the guild...

At work today, I grab melvin, get his officer login info, and check for myself...

The guy in charge of posting to realm/guild recruitment forums... is quitting. ("Mabd is right") The guild heads want to resign. The new plan is to break and reform the guild with a smaller, dedicated raiding core...

The title of the thread? "Breaking Point..."

I doan drink enough...

I feel like crap. The weather turned, and I've been walking back and forth to work in a moderately chill drizzle that sneaks inside of a jacket like Jessica Alba into my dreams.

Yesterday I came home early to miss a storm, crashed, then woke late and had A&F run maj through a coupla group quests.

Fer the record... I try not to start an ass kicking contest with a porcupine. We were doin the nagrand trampoline quest... herk lands, sees a gnome mage... prepares...

"Doan mess with him... he's o.k."

By which i meant... we're right next to the graveyard, AND the alliance base... and about to fight an elite... lay the hell off...

We got the quest done, but a NE asshat shadow priest (I believe my thoughts on NE's are well documented...) started crap then ran into the ally base...

A&F, of course, followed. The mage took the opportunity to get some cheap shots in on A&F before I scragged his gnome ass.

That's my side of the story, and I'm sticking to it...

Anyway, this post... I have to go home from work in about 2.5 hours.

I don't want to. Cuz when I do... my guild has signed me up to run Gruul with them.

They went last night. Had to pug three positions. One PUG was a hunter who wiped em twice with bad misdirects. Ten wipes in whole, High King still lives.

I REALLY REALLY don't want to go.

Melvin was upset. He's the mage tank for the guild. God help us all, HE'S THE MAGE TANK!

BTW... some insight into Melvin's personality... Zman has a post on pvp fire builds... I was discussing them with melvin when he told me it was too expensive to respec.

Melvin has 10k gold.

BTW, Z, love the guild name...

One more Melvin story... for the longest time, he ran without arcane powder. The guild wiped so often that he refused to foot the cost for the buffs...

Lunch with Melvin...

/Sigh

"I did the headless horseman last night. I got a broom! Can't wait to whiz around outlands!

And did you know they only require 75 riding skill?"

/Sigh

"We've been doing great in arena since you left! Last week, there were three people beating on the holy priest, and they ignored me when my shammy snuck up behind them and threw down a magma totem!

LOL PWNED!"

/Sigh

"One game, they were so disorganized that after I hit them with a POM pyroblast, I was able to cast two more pyroblasts without getting attacked!"

Starting something...

Did I mention that my guild sucks?

This isn't a casual observation. I believe that I have noted before that we realize that, no matter what the benefits of doing things differently, people will persist in following the path of most resistance...

I recently converted Arms&Fury to this philosphy. His warrior made 70, and he's gonna work up his blacksmithing to improve his gear. He needs insane amounts of thorium at this point.

I told him to buy it offa the AH. He wants to mine it himself.

Look... a 70 dps character with a flying mount can simply do quests, and make more than enough gold, WHILE GRINDING REP, to earn a hellova lot more thorium than he ever could just doing mining runs in Silithis. (And forget mining in winterspring and the plaguelands... way too much competition...)

Win/win... but people don't understand this. Or the magic of the AH. I can take this useless (to me) item... and alchemically convert it into something neat! I can clear all those netherstorm quests... having more fun, and progressing my character... while gaining valuable thorium as a quest reward! (Once i take those gold disks the quest giver gives me to the right auctioneer...)

But we are hard wired to believe that if we buy something from someone else... one of us got screwed... somehow...

Anyway... back to the guild. We failed to field 25 orcs for Gruul again this week. We aren't even running a regular kara group anymore. There have been defections... the one that really hurt the guild officer core was of a prot warrior that was put on the kara 1 team, epicced out, and left for a more advanced gear after getting his gear...

So Arms&Fury applies... and while he's an annoying little git... he's one of the best players I know, and has forgotten more about tanking than anyone on the server has even learned...

The guild forces people to fill out an application. A&F did so. The guild then spent TWO WEEKS discussing the app, without even bothering to contact him. He joined another guild, and wants me to hop over there with him.

Did I mention every guild on my server is trying to recruit raiding hunters?

Anyway... I've counted over ten applications this last month... and none of em got in. Or rather... most just gave up and joined real guilds...

So I posted to the guild forum.

"What guild are you guys gonna join when this one falls apart?"

Let's see what happens. It's not that I actively dislike anyone in the guild, and some are pretty cool/skilled... but most aren't, and the guild really can't tell the difference. It drives me crazy to belong in a guild that does nothing to hone its members skills...

Dear Asshat....

To: Izzil
C/O: Northern Bloodline, Lightninghoof Server, Shadowburn Battlegroup

You may not recall how we first met. Let me refresh your memory...

While escorting a lower level guildie through Zeth'Gor, in Hellfire Pennisula, you two came across a wounded level 62 BE mage by the name of Majeure. Being a 70 NE hunter, and an asshat, (like most NE hunters) you two decided to kill her (me.)

I froze you two, and then ran for my life, in a chase that lasted through half of hellfire. I thought you had more important things to do, being one of those highly sought after 54/2/5 BM builds. I thought wrong.

Ah... what a time. Laughs all around my broken body. I hope you enjoyed it just as much when my 70 main, a REAL BM HUNTER, came calling a few minutes later.

Later, Majeure was able to visit terrible vengence on your little friend, and 3 of his buddies. But I always regretted not being able to express my admiration for the extreme skill and elan you showed while shooting a char 8 levels lower than you in the back.

Until today.

I don't know why you were in that lake, nor why only 4 level 63 fish were able to get you down to 60% health... but I knew you had a plan... a cunning plan...

I hope that pyroblast, and the following scorches didn't ruin yuir day. But just to let you know... I'm keeping an eye out for ya. And, in the future... well... Maj has 4 epics in the bank waiting for level 70. I'm not sure I'll need them to deal with you, but I have to admit, I laughed my wizard's hat off watching your body smoulder at the bottom of that lake. And, the world being such a sad place... I'll need cheering again.

Soon...

Yrs Truly,

Majeure. LEVEL 67 VINDICTIVE BITCH.