Yes, I have decided to move my WOW blog to a new home. My new URL is http://www.draenicwisdom.com, and all future posts will exist on that new site. I apologize for the inconvenience, but I explain my rationale in this post on the new site. Thanks for visiting, and update your blogrolls accordingly!

Well, Seidhkona took a trip back to the Exodar in order to pick up a Tabard of the Hand, having missed the opportunity when she was a bit less experienced. Along the way she disguised herself as a blood elf in order to mess with a prisoner:

Meanwhile, Thoryna was having a great time back and forth between the western and the eastern Plaguelands. Although the area is tough, I think it is a lot of fun. I mean, where else can you cruise around with your very own poltergeist?

The thrill of fighting against the undead didn’t last all that long, however, before the Dark Portal beckoned. Following in the footsteps of Seidhkona, she looked out over the portal before making her way to Hellfire Peninsula:

Thoryna spent the evening helping out the folks at Honor Hold, and picking up a lot of new gear toward her future adventures in Outland. Won’t be long before she, too, is the experienced adventurer Seidhkona has become!

You may have noticed that Wowhead has put together new talent calculators for Wrath of the Lich King, which are based on the current WOTLK alpha. Although I know that many talents and abilities are still likely to change before the expansion is actually released, I couldn’t help thinking about future builds for Seidhkona and Thoryna — two characters who will certainly be ready for WOTLK to arrive.

Before I share them with you, I have to remind you that I am working on a Ph.D. in Early American Literature. I DON’T DO MATH. I honestly suck at theorycrafting, and for the most part I plan and alter my builds based on my in-game experience rather than actual numbers. So feel free to (politely) critique these proposed builds, and provide your thoughts and comments. I can always use good suggestions!

Let’s start with Seidhkona:

I was pretty much non-existent when The Burning Crusade came out, so having new talents at the end of a tree gets me excited. Although it is probably that many builds may not invest 51 talents into a single tree, I want to give it a try. Besides, this new thunder ability looks positively awesome! As you can see, I went with a 51/0/20 build and invested some talents into healing and critical strikes in the restoration tree. I am also (at least initially) planning to invest some points into the new Lava Burst spell, because I love the idea of doing damage with a few non-lightning spells for a change. That should REALLY help the next time I have to grind elementals!

I am really excited to try out this new build when WOTLK comes out, but being a shaman I am even more excited about the potential new spells and abilities that are not necessarily associated with talents: summoning spirit wolves, Hex, and Lava Burst. We will obviously have to wait and see what actually makes it into the expansion, but I’m looking forward to new options as an elemental shaman.

That being said, let’s also look at my current plan for Thoryna:

Being that I’m really not very good at tanking — and the fact that I really don’t enjoy it all that much — I spent most of my time looking through the potential arms and fury trees. Both of them look absolutely amazing, but in the end I couldn’t pass up the “coolness” of having the Titan’s Grip ability. Improved Mortal Strike and Sudden Death were incredibly tempting, and shifting Sweeping Strikes back to the arms tree definitely hurts, but I just can’t resist a vision of my warrior dual-wielding a pair of hefty two-handed axes as I make my way through Northrend. It’s just sexier! The decreased attack speed might hurt a bit when it comes to rage, but I can only imagine the joys of stacking the stats of a pair of two-handers! Whirlwind FTW!

The similarities in the builds says a lot about my playing style. They both go deep into a DPS tree, although one is a melee fighter and one is a spell caster. I went deep into both trees to make a pair of 51/20 builds. And I really didn’t put too much thought into questions of PvE/PvP as I made them. I’m sure that arms warriors will still be more viable in PvP at this point, and my elemental shaman will still be unable to take down anybody one-on-one, but for me that isn’t everything. I think both builds will serve my purposes well as a casual PvP and PvE player.

That being said, I don’t raid and I’m not all that good at arena. Maybe I my playing style would be better classified as “PvP and PvE lite” or something like that!

Do you ever get sick of listening to the same old argument? Ever find yourself getting thoroughly irritated by mindless, thoughtless commentary by both sides of a debate? I think I’ve reached that point this past week. Or maybe I’m just grumpy.

You see, it seems like nearly every other blog post — although the posts themselves are rarely the problem — has its comment section filled with some rant or another about whether PvE is better than PvP, a complaint about “welfare epics” and what gear should be better, arguments about the worth of the leveling process, or some other wild rant about what the real end-game should be for World of Warcraft. And while there are a lot of people out there who take these discussions seriously (some actually step back long enough to put together a few coherent thoughts), I am getting really tired of people who simply ridicule others because those people don’t conform to their view of how the game should be played.

I obviously take the game somewhat seriously, but the bottom line is that it’s just a game. And every other person I run into out there is paying the same monthly dues as I do, and I have to assume they do so because it is fun. That’s my rationale, at least. Now granted, my view of the game is obviously influenced by my in-game experience, just like anybody else. So in the interest of full disclosure, let me acknowledge that my view is tainted by the fact that:

• I play my characters on a PvP server.
• Most of my gear is made up of “welfare epics.”
• I have never been in a raid, and my schedule makes it unlikely I ever will.
• I am not part of any real guild. Koreth and I are a guild of two.
• I actually enjoy leveling my various characters.
• I play battlegrounds, and play them pretty regularly.
• I play arena, but have only been able to try 2v2 thus far.
• I have only earned a grand total of 15 badges of justice in my life.

Don’t get me wrong. I would love to raid if I could, and I definitely wish that I had more friends around Azeroth so I could more easily run instances and do group quests. I have a pile of group quests still in my log, and I’ve only been through three heroic instances in my life. I definitely like PvE, and I enjoy questing and leveling a lot. I enjoy arena battles, but again have only been able to experience 2v2. I hope to do larger arena battles someday. And I run battlegrounds and work very hard at them to try to earn myself some decent gear. I certainly don’t believe that the time I have put in qualifies them as “welfare” items, but at the same time I could care less what they are called. To me it’s just not that big a deal.

What I can’t stand, though, is the complete disrespect that so many people show for those who disagree with them about all things World of Warcraft. I have to ask myself: “Have that many people truly staked their egos and self-worth to a perceived (or virtual) status of themselves within a gaming community?” Of course the fact that I choose to blog about the game shows that I obviously tie some portion of myself to it. But just how much of our self-esteem is truly tied to our characters?

And if that is the case, are we all really so immature that we can’t even respect others who happen to be experiencing the game a different way?

I have to admit that I was more than a little excited to run across this particular promotion by Wowhead as a celebration of their second anniversary.

You see, the company that makes these X-keys products also happens to be my former employer, P.I. Engineering. For about a year and a half I worked as a web designer for the company prior to entering graduate school, and it was a great place to work. Not only did I get to work with incredible technologies, but it was the first place I ever worked where I felt a little bit of creative freedom.

Although a bit expensive, I’ve found that the X-keys products can be incredibly useful for gamers that use a lot of macros. I know for sure that a number of multi-boxers swear by them, in fact. So it makes me happy to see them partnering up with a large WOW-related website like Wowhead. You should definitely check them out!