My Perfect 24 Hours

Once had an assignment to sum up your perfect day, where you do exactly what you want, in a single image. I think this says everything.

Image from Google Images

Pretty Birdy!

It’s bittersweet because yay birdy, but at the same time, there’s people out there who’ve been at it way longer than I have with no luck. To everyone like that, keep at it. You’ll get it ^_^

New Minecraft Art: Derpy Hooves!

I got bored and was feeling rusty, and I figured at least a few of us can appreciate this.  Didn’t take too long, probably 2 or 3 hours with a height of 73 blocks. Not entirely satisfied with the flat color scheme, but I had to work with what I had.  It works.  Hope you all appreciate it.

A Resolution to Keep

First, I’m not dead. I hope you’re not too disappointed 😛

I’m terrible at new years resolutions, as I’m sure a lot of us are. However, I plan to change that this year. I do need to lose weight, for my health and also personal gratification. And, to keep me honest and dedicated, I’m going to keep updates on the blog so that I have to actually work on it.  I hope, come october, I’m down to a target weight.

If you have a suggestion for something I should do, or if you have a good healthy recipe, feel free to drop me a comment.  I could use all the help I can get 🙂

As it stands, I’m starting slow. For every 4 hours on the computer, I need to spend an hour in the gym. I’m cutting out soda (except a single glass when out with friends), desserts, and unhealthy snacks, but as of this moment not changing WHAT I eat for dinner. Once I get comfortable with that, I’ll move on.

(Although cheesy broccoli rice for dinner, while delicious, isn’t doing me any favors)

Hopefully this works 🙂 Let me know what you guys think.

New Minecraft Art: Erza Scarlet of Fairy Tale

I shouldn’t have named the blog after a WoW talent at the rate I’m dying to talk about other things.  Oops?  Anyway, here’s another piece of minecraft art.  I pulled the source picture off the Fairy Tale wiki and went from there.  Hope you all like it 🙂

Total Time Spent: Roughly 7 hours.
Height: 100 blocks.

Source Picture and complete image:

Source: Fairy Tale wiki

 

Here’s how the progress went:

Death Knights and 5.0 – New Talents, A Followup

A few weeks ago, I did a post over the new talents and what they would mean for Frost DKs and Death Knights in general.  Earlier today Blizzard released the new Talent calculator for all the classes except the monk, and DKs got quite the change.  Below is the new tree, the changes from the past, and my thoughts over the new talents as well as the Lv87 Ability.

As previously stated, the new trees have six sets of three, each of which has a focus.  You get to choose one of these talents per set, and each set is in increments of 15 levels.  Here’s the newly revised tree:

The new talent tree!

Alright, so what’s been changed?

LEVEL 15: SPREAD THE SICKNESS

Roiling Boil – No Change.

Vile Spew – A new talent. Basically, when you use it, one of your undead minions (either from Raise Dead or Army) explodes in an AoE Outbreak and deals minimal damage.  If Raise Dead wasn’t a 3 minute CD, I’d like this one.  However, it is, so that’s 1 AoE outbreak (and losing your ghoul’s DPS), followed by 5 rounds of manual refresh.  (Also, Corpse Explosion seems to have disappeared at this point)

Unholy Blight – This one makes me laugh a little, and not in a ‘haha’ kind of way. Unholy blight is now basically a shroud of Outbreak that lasts 10 seconds and infects everyone within 10 yards.  On a 1.5 minute CD, this would allow every other ‘manual refresh’ to be taken care of with the Blight instead.  (Outbreak is now the lv81 class talent.)

My Choice: Unholy Blight.  Hell Yes.  It’s back to being almost the original form that DKs started with, so there’s nostalgia value.  In addition, it cuts down on the manual reapply phases you’ll have to do, and its AoE outbreak.  Literally, what is not to love?

LEVEL 30: DAMAGE MITIGATION

Lichborne – No change.

Anti-Magic Zone – No Change.

Icy Grip – The new talent.  (Bone shield has moved to being a blood-specific ability).  Reduces the CD of your DG by 15 seconds and reduces the movement speed of the target by 50% for 6 seconds. I can see this really nice in PvP, to pull and keep enemies where they are, but unless the encounter has a Sapper-like mechanic.

My Choice – Since Bone Shield is gone, I’ll probably take either Icy Grip or AMZ, just depending on the fight.

LEVEL 45: CONTROLLING THE CROWD

Death’s Advance – Slightly changed, no longer requiring your Unholy Runes to be on CD.  Still a PvP talent.  Still can’t find the energy to care.

Chilblains – No change.

Asphyxiate – No change.  Still not a valid CC.

My Choice – Still Chilblains.  Nothing has changed here.

LEVEL 60: HEAL ME!

Death Pact – Making up for the fact that Vile Spew kills our ghoul, Death Pact now doesn’t.  It just deals 50% of its max health and heals you for 50% of your health.  Yes, they doubled the healing done and no longer kill your ghoul.  The drawback is that it’s still a 2 minute CD. Unholy will probably like this ability, with their never-die ghoul they can heal themselves.

Death Siphon – Changed. It now does less damage (2920 down from 4701 originally shown before modifiers), costs one Unholy rune, and is on no cooldown.  Your only limitation on it appears to be your GCD speed and your DPS loss.  It heals you for 75% of the damage dealt.  Unholy will also like this one because it is apparently affected by their mastery.  (RETRACTION: The tooltip was glitchy.  Death Siphon does have a rune cost, but still seems to be a GCD cooldown.)

Vampiric Blood – No change

My Choice – If I was unholy, I’d jump all over Death Siphon and Death Pact and see which worked better.  As frost, I’m torn between trying Death Siphon and sticking with VampBlood.  I’ll probably try out Death Siphon when it comes out.  I like the idea of having my own life in my hands at this point.

LEVEL 75: RUNIC RECOVERY

Blood Tap – No change, aside from still no CD.  Still on-use, still random.

Runic Empowerment – No Change

Runic Corruption – Only change is they put a hard number on the chance of proccing in the tooltip: 45%.

My Choice – Still Runic Corruption.

LEVEL 90: GETTIN’ FANCY

Gorefiend’s Grasp – The damage dealt was halved.  Other than that, no change.

Remorseless Winter – The damage was cut down to 10% of its old number (3777 down to 374), the range was cut from 10 yards to 8.  Other than that, it’s unchanged.

Desecrated Ground – No change.

My Choice – I’m extremely unhappy with the nerf to Remorseless, but I did see it coming.  The damage is negligible, which means it’s not particularly useful for ‘a little extra damage’ as I’d said earlier.  Now it’s basically a very impressive temp-CC on a minute CD.  I may end up taking Gorefiend instead to help tanks with add management.

LEVEL 87: SOUL REAPER

The 87 ability for DK is ‘Soul Reaper’, which takes no runes, is on a 6 second CD, and instantly deals 50% of the melee weapon damage.  However, after 5 seconds, if the target is below 35% health, it does an additional 50k shadow damage.  If the target dies before that, you get 50% haste.

It’s an execute, basically, but with a delay and the potential to give you 50% haste for a few seconds.  I really, really like this ability.  I can imagine it making doing quite a bit of damage.  It’s once again Shadow Damage, meaning it will probably be affected by Unholy’s mastery. (In my mind, this is infinitely better than the Control Undead, which was at least rumored to be the lv87 ability.  It’s been downgraded to lv69 at this point)

With all the Shadow Damage talents, I’m curious to see if it’s going to do anything funny to the Unholy mastery priority.  Probably not, but it would be interesting if it did, huh?

Minecraft Statue: Rozalin!

I know I’ve spammed twitter with it quite a lot when I finally got it built, but I figured ‘eh, may as well put it on a place where it won’t go missing’.  With that in mind, I’m going to keep this short:

The statue is almost completely multicolored wool, but the darker red sections that look to have some weird texture on them is netherrack.  The statue was built in roughly 7 hours across two days using a reference picture.  The total statue height is 127 blocks, with one block of dirt separating it from the nether, and came to be 11 rows too tall for the world, resulting in her very obvious haircut.

And, after all that work, here’s the final result:

Well worth the effort, don’t you think?  😀  I was scared to death of using magenta wool for shadowed skin.  Looks like it worked, though!  😀 I’m already planning my next statue.  It should be up soon.  Stay posted :3

Death Knights and 5.0 – A Quick Look At Talents

Come 5.0, the old talent trees are out and the new ones are in.  It’s a scary change for some people, and yet for others it’s a welcome one.  Personally, I’m going to withhold judgment on the new talent system until I have a chance to try it out for myself.  That said, I think that I have a bit of insight on all the talents that have been released.

If you’ve not heard yet, the new system is broken up into three sections: Class Abilities, Spec Abilities, and Talent Abilities.  Class Abilities for are abilities that everyone who is that class has no matter what spec they are.  For DKs, this includes things like Death Strike, Pestilence, and Plague Strike.  Spec Abilities are the abilities that come from the spec you’ve chosen.  For Frost DKs, this is Howling Blast, Frost Strike, and the like.

Talent Abilities are abilities you select as your talents.  In the new system, there is going to be six sets of three abilities that all share a common theme.  You can choose ONE of these abilities.  Each set is separated by a 15 level gap.  For Death Knights, this means you’re going to start with the ability to pick three new talents right at the start.  Here’s what your talent tree is going to look like:

So much simpler!

Before we cover talents though, there’s one thing you all might be worrying about…

AAAHHH!  WHERE’S MY STUFF?!

If you take a look at the list of abilities, you’re going to notice that a lot of your passive abilities are missing.  Don’t worry, they’re not gone.  Instead of having Icy Talons or Killing Machine be normal talents, they’re now your passive Spec Abilities for Frost.  Here’re the frost-specific talents that made the jump to Spec Talents:

Blood of the North (55), Icy Talons (55), Howling Blast (55), Frost Strike (55), Obliterate (58), On A Pale Horse (61)*, Killing Machine (63), Pillar of Frost (65), Rime (70), Might of the Frozen Waste (74), and Threat of Thassarian (74).

* – On a Pale Horse is a Class Talent.  All death knights will have it.

To recap, this means you’re not losing your autocrits on Oblit, your free Howling Blasts, or your 30% chance to hit with your offhand on certain attacks.

However, what does appear to be gone at this time is Nerves of Cold Steel, Endless Winter (for free interrupts), Merciless Combat (12% increased damage on mobs below 35%), and Brittle Bones (4% increased strength and increased physical damage), among others.

Now that we’ve covered what’s staying and what’s going, here’s how our talents seem to break down:

LEVEL 15: SPREAD THE SICKNESS

Roiling Blood – I like the theory behind it for trash packs.  It would replace Pestilence in a rotation, giving both a little bit of damage and causing a pestilence for every diseased mob it hits.  The nice thing is, if you’re fighting two diseased targets, they’ll refresh each other, so you don’t have to reapply diseases to your target.  However, it does not help you at all against bosses.

Corpse Explosion – This one amuses me, but I don’t think it has as good a combat ability as the other two.  It requires that you’ve already killed something, which means that you are probably nearing the end of the fight anyway.

Outbreak – No change from what we’ve got.  Compared with Roiling Blood, you don’t get damage from the pestilence of Blood Boil, but you save a unholy rune every minute (your frost fever is never going to fall off due to Rime procs).  Also, if you take Roiling Blood, you’ll need 2 GCDs to apply both of your diseases.

My Choice: Outbreak/Roiling Blood.  I honestly can’t pick between the two.  I’m leaning outbreak, but I want to give Roiling Blood a shot, just to see if it makes any difference at all.

LEVEL 30: DAMAGE MITIGATION

Lichborne: Same as what we’ve got now.  The immunity is decent in PvP as well as any fights with charm, sleep, and fear effects (which would probably be ‘none’), however it can be combined with Death Coil to heal yourself.  Personally, I never have the RP necessary to heal myself properly with this method, so I’ll pass.

Anti-Magic Zone: A raid cooldown, kinda.  It’s an AoE damage reduction.  Works as seen in the game now, but for any spec.

Bone Shield: Also one we’ve got now.  It’s your personal damage reduction, on a minute cooldown.

My Choice: Bone Shield, unless the raid is light on CDs.  Then I’d swap to AMZ.  Bone Shield’s up-time should be 100%, so you’re taking 20% less damage at all times.  Sold.

LEVEL 45: CONTROLLING THE CROWD

Death’s Advance: PvP talent.  I’m sincerely disinterested.

Chilblains: Same as what we’ve got now.  I love these things, but I’m always the one kiting.  If a fight doesn’t have adds, it’s useless, but then again, so is anything in this tier.

Asphyxiate: this was infinitely more awesome before they added the 5 second duration.  As it is now, it’s a neat little gimmick.  It replaces our ranged silence with a ranged stun that acts as a silence if the target is immune to stuns.  It also has half the cooldown as strangulate.  Interesting, but I don’t like it.

My Choice: Chilblains all the way.  I love these things.

LEVEL 60: HEAL MEH!

Death Pact: I have two main complaints: the cost (40rp and a ghoul) and the cooldown.  As frost, your ghoul is a 3 minute cooldown and is probably macroed into your pillar of frost, so it’s almost never up.  No ghoul, no DP, and you don’t get your health.  Even if it was up at the right time, you’ll lose DPS by losing your ghoul prematurely.

Death Siphon: A new one.  It’s basically a Death Strike that costs a death rune, as opposed to a normal one.  Unholy will like this one, as it’s probably affected by their mastery.  Frost, it’s more iffy than not.  75% of (the unmodified) 3116 the tooltip shows isn’t a lot in terms of healing.

Vampiric Blood: You get health, increased maximum health, and increased healing.  On a minute CD, I like vampiric blood a lot.  You can use it to pick up 15% life long enough for the healers to pull you back up to full on fewer spells.

My Choice: Vampiric Blood.  Unless Death Siphon does way more damage or our health pools get squished to having 8k being a lot, I’ve got to give it a pass.  I can see VB saving me way more often than DS.

LEVEL 75: RUNIC RECOVERY

Blood Tap: Old, but changed.  The 1 minute cd was removed, making it infinitely more viable.  However, my biggest complaint about Blood Tap compared with everything else is it’s on-use.  If you forget about it, you’re never getting runes back.  DKs already have a lot to think about; Rune Recovery shouldn’t be one.

Runic Empowerment: What we’ve got now as frost death knights.  I can live with it.

Runic Corruption: What unholy death knights have. The buff stacks instead of overwrites, so if you get it to proc with 2 seconds left, you have 5 seconds of regen, not 3.

My Choice: Runic Corruption.  I’ve been waiting for this for a while.  Hopefully it’s going to make frost much less RNG-based than it is.

LEVEL 90: GETTIN’ FANCY

Gorefiend’s Grasp: I love the idea of a targeted AoE death grip.  Use it seriously to pull adds to a tank… or use it to be a dick and pull all the adds to your healer.  (Don’t do that, or you won’t get heals next boss >.>).  It makes me laugh just reading it.

Remorseless Winter: Possibly the coolest DK ability.  It’s an AoE slow, that turns into a stun, that doesn’t need to be maintained.  While the range is a little short (only 10 yards), you don’t need to stop what you’re doing to use it.  Snare trash or adds, or even use it on a boss for a little extra damage.  A flat-out amazing ability.

Desecrated Ground: Kinda reminds me of Desecration.  It’s with Lichborne as a PvP ability in my mind, however.  Plus, it does less damage than Remorseless Winter on a twice-as-long cooldown.  It just can’t compare

My Choice: Remorseless Winter.  I suspect you’re going to see a lot of DKs with this.  Gorefiend is funny, but not anywhere near as useful.

Despite my thoughts, feel free to pick whichever you like from each.  Blizzard has said they are attempting to cut out min/max builds where everything is optimized for DPS.

Time Crash – A WoW Player’s Original 5.0 Idea

Deathwing is dead.  Thanks to Thrall, the Aspects, and their allies, the cataclysm has been averted and peace has returned to Azeroth… but not for long.

Nozdormu has some worrying news.  The Infinite dragonflight has once again appeared in the timestream.  Unlike their previous efforts to avert catastrophe through small actions, they’ve decided to go straight to the source of what they see as all of Azeroth’s pain and hardships:

They’re attempting to stop The Sundering itself.

Trying to stop this thing from forming. That's bad.

Every living being on Azeroth is in grave peril.  The Sundering, caused by the well of eternity, is one of the earliest-known events to happen on Azeroth; There is no telling what changes will occur due to the Infinite Dragonflight’s machinations.  Without a moment to waste, the heroes of the Alliance and the Horde scramble to arms, tearing a path to the Caverns of Time.

Within the past, the Infinite Dragonflight are racing to prevent the greatest catastrophe Azeroth has ever experienced.  Immedaitely upon arrival, the Heroes of Azeroth must work to set right the past, while simultaneously preventing the complete annihilation of all life on Azeroth.

However, before they can even deal with the infinite dragonflight, the heroes of Azeroth have a bigger problem to deal with.  Before they can even think of stopping the infinite dragonflight, they will have to fight their way through hoards of doomguards as infernals rain down from the sky.

Eventually, after dispatching numerous high elves, satyrs, infernals, doomguards, and at least one pit lord, the heroes will meet up with Tyrande, Malfurion, and Illidan.  However, when the Infininte Dragonflight manage to lure Illidan away from the group, Tyrande’s quiet support fails and Illidan falls to the temptation of using the mystical energies of the Well, leading the Heroes to have to subdue him before he falls completely to the Legion’s side.

When Tyrande and Malfurion return, the raid continues to push towards Azshara’s palace and the Well of Eternity.  As Cenarius’ tree spirits begin to take on the legions of doomguards and the red dragonflight swarm down from the sky to combat the infinite dragonflight, the heroes and Stormrage must deal with Xavius at the entrance to Azshara’s palace.

As Xavius falls, Tyrande is taken by the remaining Satyrs.  While Malfurion deals with the remaining Satyrs, Illidan has turned traitor and is making his destined trip to Azshara’s chambers to warn her of Malfurion’s impending plan to destroy the Well.  The heroes must guard him as he navigates the halls of Azshara’s palace from the infinite Dragonflight who mean to stop him, culminating in the team dealing with one of the Infinitely Dragonflight’s most powerful members as Illidan continues into Azshara’s chambers.

Kinda like this, only actually cool.

However, there was one more issue the heroes had to deal with.  In light of their own interference, Cenarius’ tree spirits had been too preoccupied with doomguards and dragonkin to be in position to deal with Mannoroth.  Unopposed, Mannoroth had unleashed far more doomguards into Azeroth than before.  Quickly making their way to him, the Heroes must combat Mannoroth, incapasitating him until his focus slips and he is dragged back through the Well and into the Twisted Nether.

Finally, the heroes must make their way back to Azshara’s chambers, where the preparations for summoning Sargeras into Azeroth were about to begin.  However, just as everything has started to come together, the leader of the Infinite Dragonflight appears.  He destroys the section of wall of Azshara’s chambers overlooking the Well of Eternity, and the fight is on.  As the heroes do battle standing in Azshara’s chambers, the infinite leader flies above the Well’s swirling energies.

As the Heroes deal the final blow upon the Infinite leader, Malfurion and Tyrande burst into the room.  While the Heroes of Azeroth, as well as Queen Azshara and the congregated elves, were distracted, the Infinite Dragonflight leader makes one final move.  Rearing back, he sends out a breath of sand.  Only Malfurion and Tyrande’s quick actions shield the heroes of Azeroth from the breath.

Azshara and her followers are not so lucky.  Within moments they age by centuries, until there is nothing left but dust.  The infinite dragonflight leader falls into the Well of Eternity’s vortex and the demon portals seal.  The invasion is over.

However, the portal had no time to gain power, and the energies harmlessly dissipate.  The Well stays intact.

There is no Sundering.  The Heroes of Azeroth have failed.

Returning to the future, the Heroes find nothing is as it seems.  There is only Kalimdor, the single massive continent that dominates Azeroth.  The Elven city that served as a backdrop for the War of the Ancients survives, but most of it is in a decrepit state.  The Alliance and the Horde have, somehow, managed to reform, however dynamics between the two and within each are vastly different.

The history of Azeroth has changed.  10,000 years of differences because of a single moment.  Only one thing is certain.

Azeroth will never be the same.

(Just gonna say one thing now that I’m done.  I came up with this idea before 4.3, when Well of Eternity was still a raid and the ending of Dragon Soul is unknown to us.  That said, I don’t want anyone to go ‘That couldn’t happen because X’.  I came up with the idea because it sounded cool.  I knew it would never happen.  That said, I always love comments :D)

Griefing Griefers

So as I was setting up for our Thursday night 10-man, a friend in mumble tells me he’s out at the Crucible of Carnage dealing with griefers.  So, being the nice guy I am, I mounted up and rode into battle.  Looked something like this:

Best part of this? The In-guild Comment from a friend of mine.

I have to say, I don’t pvp.  I don’t gank.  I don’t grief.  But when my friends and I ended up out there dealing with a bunch of lv84s and 85s who found it funny to give hell to a group of leveling horde, I discovered something.  I definitely enjoyed myself more than I thought possible.  Miri is totally corrupting me!  It’s all her fault!  Best part had to have been when one of the griefers created a lv1 character just to play innocent and ask us to stop ganking them.

PS: To everyone who read my first two posts: thank you.  I know they were really bloody long.  I’m working on making my posts shorter.  To everyone who went TL:DR, I can’t blame you.  They totally were XD  I come from a creative writing background where long is good.  Here, I want to be shorter.  I will be shorter, I promise.  Thanks for not giving up 🙂