Great Timing…

So Wednesday, only a few days away from rendering, I was streaming some TV and got a virus. This wasn’t some annoying spyware, but this was a virus that ate my system. I couldn’t open programs, I couldn’t even try to fix it. My first solution was to punch a hole in the wooden door in my room. Surprisingly, this didn’t fix the situation. Before even trying to fix things I did an emergency render (not in great quality) and sent it off to Bizzle while my computer was essentially covered in AIDS. I made a copy of the project file, and put it on my second HD which has all of my fraps files and unplugged that.

Immediately after, I had no choice but to restart, and after doing that I could no longer get into windows. Long story short, I lose everything on my first HD and had to format. Since there was only fraps files on my second HD and I was able to save the project files, after a day of reinstalling trying to salvage files everything is back and ready to go. This was some terrible timing and the whole project could have been easily lost, along with the fact that Bizzle is going away on Saturday and things were in a rush, and I’m in exam period right now. But an all-nighter and a door later, everything is back in order and on schedule. Should be able to render this weekend.

Cataclysm Wishlist

Now, I’m well aware cataclysm is still a long way away, but I came up with a basic wish list for our class in the expansion, some changes in direction that would be improvements. While I understand that we can’t have everything, as all classes must have their weaknesses and counters, I think these would be fair adjustments and improvements to make our class as balanced and fun as it can be.

Vanish: Working as Originally Intended

Instant hostile abilities occurring at the same time as vanish should not cause vanish to break, as there are far too many in the game and this will often occur unintentionally and break vanish. Abilities and projectiles that occur slightly after vanish and treat it as thought it never occurred (i.e. Getting blinded, deathcoiled, shived, auto-attacked, or fireblasted out of vanish) is a broken mechanic that should be fixed.

The 3.3 attempted vanish fix showed us that Blizzard is aware of the problem but doesn’t know how to solve it. We don’t want god mode unbreakable vanish, we just want the bugs removed from it.

Address our Survivability Issues

Rogues are one of the most often focused classes in the game. Our biggest issue is not our low survivability, but rather the fact that we cannot break cc in any way other than with trinket. We therefore are extremely susceptible to damage that occurs during stuns or cc. During this time, the defenses of dodge or cloak of shadows are meaningless. It would be a big help and put greater control into our hands if we were able to defend ourselves during stuns without the requiem of a PvP trinket.

An idea here? Make cloak usable during stuns. With this change, it might be worth it to pick of the cloak glyph that reduces physical damage and this would probably give us the adequate counter to stuns that we desperately need.

Kidney Shot should Be our Class Defining Ability

As WoW’s stun lock class, kidney shot should be our signature move. It is often dodged, blocked, or parried. It can be removed by ret paladin’s hand of freedom. There are also too many comparable stuns that other classes have that are as good or stronger than KS situationally (Deep Freeze, Hammer of Justice, Gnaw (ranged stun), Bash/Maim, etc). Kidney shot is also on DR with all stuns, making it clearly on the same level or lower.

Make Kidney shot (more…)

So last week, Blizzard dropped it’s 3.3 content patch. I don’t know about everyone else, but for me this is easily my favorite content patch of the expansion so far. I thought that 3.2 was a pretty big flop, especially in comparison. It had some good ideas but I didn’t think anything really stood out. 3.3 has been a lot more interesting, and here are some of the reasons why.

Looking for Dungeon System Success

The looking for dungeon feature has finally given players what the LFG feature never could. With “looking for group”, you would rarely be able to find party’s because you had to queue for specific dungeons, and party rosters were much more in the hands of players. Not only that, but with only a server of people to choose from, the feature just didn’t work well.

The looking for dungeon feature really stepped things up. Using your entire battlegroup to find players means that it actually works. The daily LFD quest will let players actually get to know the well designed 5 man instances that most people have forgotten about, with the meaningful reward of two emblems of frost for doing a heroic each day; a reward that will actually keep players coming to these dungeons. Not only that, the weekly raid quests will actually make some use of the raids that will be otherwise forgotten, and once again gives everyone access to frost emblems.

Icecrown Citadel – Putting the Cool Factor back into PvE

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but how weak was Trial of the Crusader as a raid when compared against others? I know a lot of people liked the fact there was no trash, and yes that was a nice feature, but having a major raid instance that occurred almost entirely in a single arena seemed pretty lame to me. (Actually, doesn’t that sound kind of like Blizz trying to do to PvE what they did to PvP, literally putting loot into an arena?) I’m not a lore expert by any means, but come on, TotC was pretty lame, I didn’t really care at all about the superfluous plot. Random boss and lame boss encounters in the same room… and the whole jousting, knights of the round table scenario really doesn’t fit the warcraft universe in my opinion. So how would Blizzard rebound from this?

Enter Icecrown Citadel

Although (more…)

Experiences Making the Video

Click the picture for full Size Image

So we’re in the final stage before this is released right now (I know I’ve said similar things in the past, but finally I can say it with confidence. Video should be out this weekend or early next week). This is easily the most work I’ve ever put into a PvP video, and that isn’t including all the work that Bizzlesnaff has done. I guess even in the climate of WOTLK, where arena is considered by many to be the only real PvP, I’ve always wanted to make the best world PvP / dueling video I could, showing what I can do while having quality content and strong editing.

At first I thought about making this about a 15 minute video of only the very best clips I had. Problem with this was that I ended up with 40 minutes of content I liked.

I also thought about making this only about the PvP with almost no editing. This is now the opposite, because along the way I changed my mind. At about the time when I was going to start looking for editors to help me out because I’m terrible with Machinima, Bizzlesnaff happened to come back and expressed interest in getting involved in some kind of project. For the last few months I’ve been corresponding with him, trying to give feedback while he’s worked on some pretty badass stuff for the video. I really gained a lot of appreciation for the amount of time that goes into videos like this or this in that it can easily take hours to finish a few seconds of a polished scene.

I had a lot of fun making this video, had a chance to have some really interesting and intense duels with a lot of top PvPr’s. With things almost finished this is the last time I’m going to talk about it before the video is released in the coming weeks, I promise.

So I guess most people don’t know what I’ve been up to the past few months, as I’ve had people wondering if I quit, where I play, etc. So here’s my story…

Since S6…

I started season six, before this past summer, playing in 3s with Aeias and Massive (on his alt, Deadly Glad priest). We were about 2600 and 9th on rampage (when it was still a competitive battlegroup) after about 3 weeks of playing, and moving in the right direction. Aeias had some things come up and couldn’t play anymore, so this put an end to that team. I ended up working for the summer part time at a place called Playdium, which I’m mentioning for those of you from the GTA. On a side note, it was a pretty out of place job for me, but in this economy there isn’t exactly many options for student jobs, you have to take what you can get. I also moved back home with my parents during the summer, so I was playing pretty casually. Without a serious 3s team, I didn’t have much reason to log on. The only thing I really did during this time that was WoW related was steadily work on Eviscerate X.

I transferred to Blackrock to with the intention of making a team with Neurological and Ely (formerly the priest of Gravitas Gaming) but it didn’t work out, due in no small part to the fact that Neurological is a fucking strange fellow. So after that brief, failed attempt at a team for a couple of weeks, I went back to playing casual and working on the video while still looking for a team. Now for me, if I’m going to play 3s and take arena seriously, I really want the right team. One that will push for the top and work together to improve; a team with the potential to be as good as anyone else. In my opinion, if I’m not playing with this kind of team, arena isn’t worth the hassle or frustration.

Moving along with this little story, I saw that EG was looking for a rogue, so I (more…)

The Spec Page and Macro Page have been given their own links and have been updated for 3.3! For future reference these pages themselves will be updated, but I’ll make a post when they are to keep let you know.

You can find them at the top of the site or on these links here (or clicking the images below):

Spec Page

Macro Page