Sometimes, the most beautiful thing of all is watching the destruction of something beautiful.

Note: All of this is written from the perspectie of a druid who has, as of late, been tanking heroic 5 mans for his friends geared mostly from pvp.

I’ve never fully enjoyed an MMO game, at least, not as far as the designers intended most folks to. The reason for this is that I am not really a fan of raiding. Sure, I love seeing new enemies, and cool scripted events, and I definitely enjoy loot. But when it comes to actual raiding, I’ve simply never been a fan.

The deal is, there is conventionally a single “goal” in any given MMO: “Get gear to make yourself awesome” (let’s stick with what’s standard here). Usually, there are multiple ways to work toward this goal, with one way being obviously best: gear up by doing single group dungeons, gear up by doing 10 man raids, gear up by doing 25 man raids (winner!).

Now, that is how it’s been for ages, and is pretty accepted. The reason this isn’t what I prefer is, as mentioned, I am not a fan of raiding. I am just not a fan of sitting around for 40 minutes so that you can get 25 people together so that you can sit around for another 40 minutes while a fight is explained so you can fight for 10 minutes (which is fun, mostly) so you can sit around for another 40 minutes and repeat the process. Yes, those numbers are exaggerated.

What is my style? Dungeon runs with my friends. I feel like I can make a difference when I’m only with 4 other people. It’s just the way I am.

So what am I writing about? I’m writing because I’m “ensaddened” by the semi-recent change in World of Warcraft which made “Badges of Justice” drop from some raid dungeons.

Why would this upset me? Because it means that what I had hoped the “badge system” represented was in fact not correct. I had hoped that the badge system was a method to add a new goal to the end game, with a unique path specific to that goal.

Explanation:

Classic MMO convention:

• Goal: Sweet gear
• Paths: Dungeon Runs, Raids

WoW’s convention:

• Goal 1: Sweet PvE gear
• Paths: Dungeon Runs, Raids

• Goal 2: Sweet PvP gear
• Paths: Battlegrounds, Arenas

What I hoped WoW’s new convention to be:

• Goal 1: Sweet Raid gear
• Path: Raids (with initial gear coming from easier raids, and easier dungeons)

• Goal 2: Sweet PvP gear
• Path: Battlegrounds, Arenas

• Goal 3: Sweet Dungeon gear
• Path: Dungeon runs (and the badge system)
  

This was, to me, a reasonable expectation. Precedence is set for such differentiation. The most obvious example is in comparing two stats: Defense and Resilience.

Resilience is a PvP stat. It decreases the amount of periodic damage you take (DoTs), decreases the chance you are critically hit by spells and melee attacks, and decreases the amount of damage you take from critical strikes.

Defense rating is a PvE stat. It increases your chance to dodge, block, and parry an incoming attack while simultaneously decreasing the chance you will be hit or critically hit with melee attacks.

Defense rating is partially useless to any class that does not have the “block” or “parry” skills. It also does nothing to prevent spell damage. In PvP this means that it is trumped by resilience, which benefits all classes.

Resilience rating is useless in PvE to any class that has already reached the “immune to crit” cap. Defense, on the other hand, continues to add dodge, block, parry, and “decreases chance to be hit” even after you have reached the “immune to crit” cap.

It is for these reasons that the resilience stat is a clear winner for PvP, and the defense stat is a clear winner for PvE. And, thus, you can see the “goals” for end game in WoW diverge: gear up for PvP is one, gear up for PvE is another. And the paths to these two goals is separate as well (with some overlap, which is a good thing).

Given that itemization difference, I was hoping that the badge system would slowly expand in order to create gear tailored toward players who wanted to do 5 man dungeons. I had hoped this idea would be supported with 5 man heroic dungeons of increasing difficulty. Instead, the badge system merely awards “raid jr.” loot, and, in line with that, badges are now given in raids.

What would have made gear “5 man” oriented?

• varied resists
• “mutating” resists (take more arcane damage, and your arcane resist goes up at the cost of some [or all] other resist[s])
• stamina
• for tank classes, a “reduces damage from each separate source by X,” to better deal with tanking multiple targets
• for tank classes, something that improves their AE threat generation
• for dps/heal classes, something that reduces their AE threat generation
• for crowd control classes, something that improves their ability to do that
• more “after a successful kill” type bonuses for all classes

And so on…

Ah well, I can continue dreaming.

And here are 5 that are especially so…

http://www.cracked.com/article_15816_5-most-horrifying-bugs-in-world.html

I am a bad blogger :(

To appease the blogger gods, here are some old pictures of me going from “balding” to “bald.”

http://www.citizenl.com/bald/

My mother showed me an article over the holiday vacation. It was something written by Eleanor Roosevelt and published in the July 1945 issue of “Coronet,” which my mom owned for some reason. It’s worth sharing:

I do not like the word tolerance. If you tolerate something, you do not like it very much.

I believe that what we have to do in this country is to stop disliking things and like them.

In the future the world is going to be tied together by airplanes and radio, and we are going to be near many people whom we have not had to know in the past. It is not going to be possible just to tolerate our neighbors. We are going to like them or they are not going to like us. Our neighbors are going to include people whose skins are yellow, brown, red, black and white. Their religions will be more varied than the color of their skins and our liking must come from understanding. Regardless of race or religion, human beings have certain things in common and we must discover that quickly.

We, in this country, are highly mechanized people. We have inventive genius where machinery is concerned, and mechanical skills. Some of the things that we have accomplished seem nothing short of miracles to other people.

Other people understand things, however, which we know little about. Our boys who have been in India are coming back to tell us about snake charmers and the people who make flowers grow before your eyes. These are powers we know nothing about.

So we have things to learn from other people just as they have things to learn from us, but we are not going to learn if we just “tolerate” each other.

I have an idea that we are going to find some fundamental traits, such as kindness and integrity and love of children, are present in many human beings.

If we can do away with fear, we will begin to love. If we are not afraid of aggression among nations, either in the military sense or the economic sense, we may have peace. If we are not afraid of being dominated by those who are stronger than ourselves, then we will learn to like people and to cooperate with them.

First we must cease to be afraid of our neighbors at home and take the word “tolerance” out of our vocabulary and substitute for it the precept, live and let live, cooperate in work and play and like our neighbors. If we do this, we will soon find that our basic needs and desires are the same, and that given the same opportunities for development, we will develop in much the same way.

The problem is not to learn tolerance of your neighbors, but to see that all alike have hope and opportunity and that the community as a whole moves forward.

I’ve had many blogs throughout the years. My very first blog I ended up breaking horribly while attempting to customize. After realizing I had broken it, quite possibly beyond repair, I gave up. I made a single post:

“Holy crap,” I said, “I royally screwed up when making this page. Perhaps through dumb luck it will turn out cool. “.

As luck would have it, it ended up being the coolest thing I will ever do in my life… ever. Why? This blog was on livejournal. My livejournal username was “L.” Ever since the “autocomplete” feature has been put into browsers, so too have people been accidentally truncating their URLs when backspacing bits of the autocomplete. Many, many, MANY people ended up at my journal completely by accident. They were trying to get to some other journal that started with the letter L and hit enter too early, or backspaced and hit enter, or something. My single post ended up getting a cult following and now has 1262 comments.

Shameful, I will never be able to compete with the level of coolness I have accidentally achieved.

http://l.livejournal.com/

Once a friend described me as the “Master of the Laze.” The other day I found myself wanting a laptop computer. Why? Because I was on the couch and my computer was not. I didn’t want to have to get up off the couch. It’s that same kind of lazy that makes me think I will never, ever manage to have a worthwhile blog. My old blog was “semi worthwhile.” For this one, I think I will aim for “occasionally semi worthwhile.” Here’s to hoping I find time and motivation to post, and wits enough to avoid foolishness.

I’ve been a PC user from the get go: from my first p100 to my two celeron systems, to my amd, to my latest intel dual core. I’ve always had “minor” issues with windows operating systems. The most egregious of which was turning my “media” folder into an OS-defined “media” folder and thus disabling my ability to sort by “last modified” and then re-defaulting these folders to their “media folder” settings despite my attempts to reset them to regular folders (finally resulting in me having to overwrite the registry “folder sniffer” settings).

Recently I installed vista and it has destroyed me. I am often unable to make basic changes because Vista is trying to “protect” me. I’ve done all I can to get rid of these silly protections, but that just makes Vista even more upset with me. Recently I lost all my Office shortcuts in my start menu (the shortcuts exist, they just don’t point to anything). Trying to repair, uninstall, or reinstall office is, without fail, returning an error. Trying to diagnose office tells me I can’t diagnose without the event log running. Trying to run the event log tells me “the instance name passed was not recognized as valid by a wmi data provider,” which means nothing to me.

You’ve finally done it, Vista. You’ve finally killed me. I’m trying drastic solutions now in an attempt to do the most basic of tasks, and it’s exactly as retarded as those Mac commercials make it seem.

Goodness. Here I am working crunchy hours and what is happening on the outside? Team Fortress 2 beta released, there are pre-order deals for Hellgate: London that allow entrance into an early beta there, and I’m aggressively awaiting a computer I ordered to be shipped out. This convergence of time-wasting activities (”aggressively waiting” for a computer is most certainly a huge time sink) is unfortunate for me, he who is stuck at work.

On the plus side, I’ve blogged for longer than my previous blog.