Rubymelon

rainy morning folding laundry

(ruby) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 10:31:00 -0800

Laundry Day

The feeling after doing laundry can feel incredibly relaxing and stress relieving after midterm week(s) have stormed by. I hear the rain falling through what remaining leaves are clinging to the branches outside my window. I listen to the soothing voices of Clazziquai in their first album. As the pile of folded clothes grows higher, as my sock/underwear drawer gets full, I feel a fullness that can only be understood by someone who's wondered if their supply of clothes will last through midterms week. I mean, having to do laundry during midterms week would have been a terrible tragedy.

This also means I can mix and match and wear whatever I please, instead of having to look at what I have left to think about what to wear. I filtered out a few pieces that were too small now as well. Only one of them has a stain on it, but it's relatively small. I'll have to find a clothe donation box sometime this week.

Today the only class I have is at 3:30 pm. Waking up at 8:00 am gives me the luxury of having a slow calm morning. Granted I'll come home late in the evening since I have to stop by the lab after class.. But while you come home tired in the evening, it feels like you've accomplished more than when you come home in the afternoon and don't do much till night. Or maybe that's just me.

Boo !

(ruby) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 15:17:42 -0800

Happy Haunted Halloween

made in. Maya 2008

Nine Hours in the Lab

(ruby) — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 01:33:39 -0700

Nine hours in the lab.....

Playing, and Replaying

(ruby) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 22:03:15 -0700

et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis

She enjoys classical music.
She enjoys great music.
She seeks out great art and great music on a regular basis.
She thrives to be an artist.

And I?

I know not of great art. Nor do I seek out great art. Great art. There was a man of great knowledge that told me of great art. There were methods of analyzing great art. And training an eye for great art was of great importance. But I feel, I feel that his knowledge was too great for me to absorb in such a short amount of time. That is not great art. This is great art. That is not to be considered great art. Will I find great art?

Will I ever find, that which is known to be, great art?

Tonight I know not of great art. But I listen to a piece that comes back and visits me every so now and often. I know not yet of great art, so I cannot say, I cannot say that this is great art. I know not of music so I may not say this is great music. But tonight the words, et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis, wrap around my thoughts as I sit here in my chair.

Lazy Peon

(ruby) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 20:13:33 -0700

I recently re-activated my alliance account because I missed my druid. And on the way to Durotar dual grounds I ran into the Orc/Troll starting grounds. As I was about to move on to the next area, since you can't pick on level 1s, something caught my eye. A red name! I could pick on Lazy Peons! Anyone that has made an orc or a troll before should be familiar with the quest to whack Lazy Peons to make them go back to work. I gave the Lazy Peon a good whack all right.

Average wait time: Endless

(ruby) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:39:57 -0700

Average wait time: Endless

I still remember how long ques took before they made battlegrounds cross-server. 30 minutes was short considering an AV que could take well over an hour. After cross-server was implemented, que time started to get shorter which was a much welcomed change. It was nice to be able to play when I felt like it, and not have to wait until I was busy doing something else to overcome boredom. I mean, when your que pops when you're about to log.. well that's just sad. And remember how you would que up for something, fly all the way to some area to farm and your que would pop and then zone you out the battlemasters? At that point you don't feel like traveling all over again do you? Of course there are some downsides to zoning back out to where you zoned in from. Like not being able to que out of being stuck somewhere, but this is a minor discomfort compared from before.

But as with all if not most things, if something gets better, you want more. I'm here, I want to do a battleground, but the que is 7 minutes. 4 minutes. 2 minutes. 1 minute. < 1 minute. But I'm impatient. I want to be in now. I'm tired of waiting for the que. No matter how short the que seems, if it's not instantaneous, I find myself grumbling. You would think that after they reduced a seemingly 2 hour que to a 2 minute que, one would be greatful. But no, I want my que now.

And what do I get? I get into a battleground that is not even half-ful. We get rushed over and the game is a loss before it reaches 2 minutes into the game. So it's a wait for a loss and a wait for the next que. Over, and over again. The average wait time is endless.

Average time of Patience: Non-existant

Premades? They can be nice and all, but there are always things that make it difficult. People have RL things to do, and usually in PUG premades, people don't work together and are very impatient. Can there be a worse combination? If a PUG premade loses, it doesn't occur to them that they don't have a good mix of defense and offense going on. The only thing that comes to mind is, "I'm DPSing why is nobody guarding the flag?!?! This is fail. /rage quit" Is it just PUG pvp? No you see it all the time in PUG pve as well. "Oh there's a new boss in VoA. What?! We just wiped on this boss that nobody has done before? /rage quit" Of course, it's not possible to knock sense into every noob in the game. There are too many people to do that. But if you notice, there is this thing which seems to be a "General Common Sense" that forms.

For example, while it took a painstakenly long time and the much argued over holiday achivement, there are now more horde players that noticed that, hey! if we rush in the beginning to take aid station and bunkers, there is a good chance we can win (Because only one person can cap one bunker at a time, people were forced to try to cap the north and south bunkers up north). So now you see a greater number of players that encourage each other to rush north. Note that this is not something that happened on Horde side. I experienced the change on Alliance too. The only difference is that I saw this change on Alliance first before on the Horde side. (Also note that the Alliance bridge is a far better advantage)

Or take VoA, the most widely and easily pug-ed raid in Wrath. While it took a few weeks for this general common sense to kick in, now everyone knows (and yells at people who don't know) that you have to attack the add when Emalon picks it.

And while there will always be those dumb idiots that get stuck at Farm/Stables and get farmed, and while there will always be dumb idiots that don't read /bg chat or make snide remarks, there are also people that pay attention and pick up these small tidbits of general common sense. So while the average time of patience is non-existant, it would be good to remember and hope for a bigger population with the general common sense, instead of telling them "you're all retards. you guys suck. it's your fault we lost you idiots."

How to make it Easier

It's always easier to cope with pugs when you have some other form of entertainment. Music is one example, movies/tv shows are another. Personally, I use a program called GOM player. Instead of using a default skin, I use a user-skin that makes it so it only shows the screen without any borders. I can shrink this and opt to keep it on top while playing. So I can shrink the size and place it anywhere on my screen while in a battleground/raid/instance. This way, I can pay attention to incoming and flag ninjas, and still enjoy whatever I'm watching.

All I want are some kittens!

(ruby) — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 13:54:29 -0700

Basket full of fuzzy fluffy goodness.
WTB two kittens.
One orange and one grey kitten.

The Secret to Winning IoC (Snipe Spot)

(ruby) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 19:54:28 -0700

Isle of Conquest (IoC) is the new battleground that was introduced along with ToC. It's a 40 man raid like AV but can be more frustrating at first if you don't know what's going on. Each side has a fortress and the idea is to break down a wall (it can be any of the 3 walls), cap the graveyard, and kill the boss inside. Before patch, it was easy if you capped the Hangar because you could para-troop in and spam bombs (that you didn't have to re-fetch) on the gate. However, now the bombs are a one time use so it's more time consuming than before. So, there is a new way to winning IoC.

So What's the Snipe Spot?

At the beginning of the game, encourage your team to zerg the Docks. If your team loses the initial zerg, try to get people to help you cap the Docks after they leave. Once you cap the Docks there will be two shiny, pretty, and beautiful Glaive Throwers that await you. Try to make sure you or someone that knows the sniper spot take the glaives. You then drive the Glaive Thrower to this spot:

For those who need a little more visual image as to where this position is, here is another screenshot:

You drive from the docks, and instead of going to the front wall, you turn right up to the place between the two mountains. People don't usually notice the glaives from this position, and they can't really shoot you from the fort this far. Note that the glaives have an infinite range so you can throw glaives freely. Its also nice if you have a couple players guarding the glaives just in case they do come after you. If you have two glaives shooting from this position the wall will go down in no time.

Enjoy:D

[Macro] Casting Sacred Shield on Self

(ruby) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 17:02:04 -0700

I happen to not use auto self target for various reasons. There are some spells that I usually cast on my self only though, and one of those is Sacred Shield. So I found myself a macro that will let me cast it on myself without having to target myself.

/cast [target=player] Sacred Shield

Why You Do It From Behind

(ruby) — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 13:43:34 -0700

Why You Do It From Behind

While I have played Wow since vanilla, I have mainly played with casters and healers. My main started with a warlock and my alts continued on as priests and druids. While I had a warrior, I leveled it mainly because of the fun of charging and intercepting. When my druid was feral it was strictly for bear tanking. When I was leveling my DK for a while it didn't really matter which buttons I smashed because you could lolfaceroll without having much problem. But leveling a rogue has proved to be very challenging from my caster oriented background. Even before I played Wow I always played casters such as mages in other games. Is it because of how reliant a melee character can be of gear and skill?

Rogues used to be the most common class in the game. The appeal of a "rogue" image or characteristic has been maintained in most RPG related games. Their ability to be agile and being downright a "rogue" - stab you in the back and get away with it - was probably a reason why they were widely popular. Because of being able to avoid damage and get away, and because of how healers usually neglected healing rogues, Korean Wow players came up with a term Do-Dak-Boong. An abbreviation for "Rogues shut up and Bandage." But as I leveled my rogue, I came to realize, while there is the convinience of being able to vanish and run away, it's not always that easy as a rogue to slide into the shadows. Trial and error was something that came to my doorstep more than any other class I've leveled before, and acquiring experience for skill was crucial. It's no wonder why there are so many "bad rogues" or so many rogues that "have no skill." A rogue with no skill can be absolutely terrible, but a rogue with amazing skill is just jaw-dropping. When you run into a highly skilled rogue, there is literally nothing you can do but watch an after-image flashing by. Once you think you've figured out a plan to out-smart the rogue, he has another card up his sleeve.

So it's not hard to realize that if you want to play a rogue well, it's not going to be something quick and easy as learning a rotation. And I cringed one day in vent when I heard Apple complaining about melee not attacking from behind, and those that do probably don't know why they're doing it. Not all melee attack from behind. Most of those that do, only do it because they've heard it sometime or another while playing Wow for a while. I've fit in the latter of those two, and today I decided to figure out why. I used the wonderful Google search engine to find some information and this is what I found.

Here's what it all boils down to:

1. You can't block or parry an attack from behind.

2. Mobs can dodge from behind.

3. Players can't dodge from behind.
(Note that rogues that have evasion up still can't dodge from behind)

Since mobs or players blocking, parrying, and dodging is just as much annoying as missing an attack, not only is it important to have expertise along with hit rating, it is important to get behind your target as much as possible. And that's why you do it from behind. I think it's even more important as a rogue than any other melee class, as rogue CDs and stunning are highly important to not only killing an enemy but surviving from them.