And no, I’m not talking about loot.  I’m talking about my Enhancement Shaman alt.  Generally, I’m having a lot of fun with him, but I’m starting to notice a trend.

The ease of fights with him depends a LOT on the good old RNG.  If Windfury procs in a fight, it goes pretty quick.  If it procs a couple of times, it usually means I’m standing over a corpse.  If it doesn’t proc at all, however, the fight can sometimes be painfully slow.

Now, I understand that all fights are in some way beholden to the RNG for success.  Warriors love to see a mob dodge, so they can obliterate their foes with Overpower.  Feral Druids love to see Omen of Clarity go off, Rogues love to see their poisons proc in succession, and so on and so forth.

With this Shammy, though, I feel like the RNG has a much larger impact on the outcome of a battle.  This doesn’t usually translate into whether I succeed or fail, but it can play a big part, especially if I have multiple mobs hammering away at me.  (On a side note, I’m also not to sure about my ability to handle multiples…I seem to have had more problems with my shammy than any other class I’ve played when the numbers are against me.  But that’s for another day perhaps.)

So is the Enhancement Shammy’s reliance on the RNG a good thing or a bad thing?  It can obviously be good on those times when it works in my favor, and a back to back Windfury two shots an equal level mob.  It can also cause me huge headaches when I have to lean on shocks and boring white damage whilst fighting multiple enemies.  I’m thinking that it also gives me a certain level of unpredictability for other encounters.

Can I take on equal level elites, for instance?  Or even elites a level or two below me?  With my druid, elites were never a real problem.  I had many tricks that I could use against them.  With the Shammy, though, I kind of feel like if I attack an elite I have to pray that Windfury does in fact go off.

So, are there any other classes that are as reliant on the RNG for success?

I’ve never been much for the rep grind.  Never.  I have 2 70s, a level 60, and numerous, numerous alts of virtually every range.  I have a grand total of 2 exalted factions, SSO and Violet Eye, both on my druid.  I think I got soured on the whole rep grind due to the Timbermaw Furbolg pre BC.  Back then, you had to grind a LONG time just to get to stupid Winterspring.  (I did notice, however, that they made it much easier.  Now you only have to complete one quest to make your way through the tunnel safely.)  Since then, I’ve always avoided rep grinds.  The 2 exalted factions I have came naturally, through Kara runs and griding out cash for my epic flyer.

That being said, I find myself in a rep grind for the first time.  I’ve been spending a good deal of time on alts of late, and in the interest of letting my 60 shadow priest accrue some rested XP, I picked up my 42 shammy recently, and have since gotten him to 45.  He’s a lot of fun right now — Windfury crits FTW!  (As an aside, if you ever want info on Shammys, Too Many Annas is a good place to start!)

The problem?  I cannot stand the Elekk mount.  I don’t like how they look, I feel like they are “slower” than the other mounts, though I know they are not.  I especially don’t like the fact that I fricking GET STUCK ON CRAP ALL THE TIME.  Especially doorways.  With every other mount in the game, you can run into just about anywhere, not so with the stupid Elekks.

So, I made the decision that I needed to get a different faction’s mount.  Taking a look at the state of my reputation, I found I was already revered with Stormwind.  A horsey sounds good to me!  I punched up WoWhead, and analyzed the factions page to find some level appropriate quests to boost my SW rep.

Off I went to various parts of Azeroth, and struggled to find quests that were worth my time in terms of rep and time.  I bemoaned this on the guild channel, when a guildy asked me something:  had I gone back and done all the starter quests?  No, I had not.  I had assumed that rep rewards had diminishing rewards based on level.  It turns out they do not.

Wahoo!!!

I jumped the nearest bird and headed to Stormwind.  I left Stormwind riding my ugly purple elephant, and took a hard left towards Northshire Abbey.  Yes, Northshire Abbey.

It turned out to be quite fun to annhiliate the old level 1-5 content that was there, completing all the quests, and netting pretty healthy faction awards.  I did feel a LITTLE weird, since there were level 1s and 2s actually doing honest leveling, so I tried to stay out of their way and finish the quests quickly.  I also made sure to kill only exactly what I needed.  I didn’t want to lay waste to the area and screw over the poor level 1s.

It sure was nice to blow through a lot of that stuff.  I remember wiping once or twice to Garrick Padfoot, and a single Chain Lightning in his direction ended him this time.

I also had a bit of nostalgia, as that was the first zone I played in the game.  I still remember watching the cinematic for the first time, then the flyover narrative intro to the human race.  My first character, a human rogue.  Way back in the day. 

I also remember that from the very first quest, I could see that WoW was different, different and far better.  I had played every major MMORPG previous to it, and from quest 1 WoW blew those others out of the water.  Asheron’s Call, Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot, Star Wars Galaxies, and more — none of them held a candle to WoW.  In a way, I guess WoW was kind of like I was the other night, a 2 ton bull charging through a china shop of level 1 content.  WoW to the MMORPGs that preceeded it was kind of like me compared to the Kobold Vermin running around Northshire Abbey.  Most of them died before they could raise their protest of “You no take candle!”  It was much the same for WoW, they nuked the hell out of the competition in an instant.

That’s why whenever I hear mention of the “WoW killer,” I just don’t believe it.  Blizzard has been on their “game” for a long time, and I expect it to stay that way.  The only WoW killer, in my mind, is World of Warcraft 2.

Excuse the corporate speak, but it has come to may attention that a lot of bloggers are trying to get the word out about a potentially unjustified perma-ban issued by Blizzard. I say potentially, because I don’t know enough of the situation personally to make any kind of a judgement. I still thought it was a good idea to put up a link to a post by TemerityJane about the incident. Feel free to read it and decide for yourself. If it was unjustified, it needs to be rectified, sooner rather than later.

Saturday afternoon, around 5 pm, I logged in to hit the AH for a few consumables. I had an SSC run at 9pm, and wanted to make sure I was stocked up on reagents, pots, oils and whatnot. Well, I turned to run out of the Ironforge AH, and poof. My PC shut down. Full stop.

I fired it back up again - maybe it was just bad luck, a random crash, who knows. As it’s loading I can see that the screen is covered with short 1 inch or so vertical dashes. The whole screen. Past the windows loading screen, I get nothing. No desktop, no safe mode, nothing.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!! YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!

Now, I’m not as tech minded as the guys in my IT department, but I know my way around the computer. I’ve been building systems for myself and friends and family for over 5 years now. I won’t bore you with the technical details, but I was eventually able to isolate the problem to one thing: my video card was dead. I just upgraded my Mobo, CPU, memory and Video card about 6 months ago, and the card was plain dead already.

I flew to my brother’s place and picked up a VGA cable. (I long since made the switch to DVI, and couldn’t find a single VGA cable around the house!) Hooked up the onboard video, and it fired up like a dream. I had to turn every little option down to the minimums, but I was able to join the SSC run. My performance wasn’t noticeably worse, either. It didn’t LOOK as good, but WoW has never really been about the “looks” for me.

Thank the Gods for Onboard Video. And thank Blizzard for making a game that you don’t need a 8800GTX to run! I’m also glad that I bought the card from Newegg.com, as I can still RMA it!

Yes, I know this ostensibly a WoW blog, but sometimes real life cannot and should not be ignored. I don’t live far from NIU, and have some friends that went there. My heart goes out to all the families affected. I know there is no way to make the pain any better, but sometimes you just have to say what you feel. My heart is broken. I wish I had some better words or some kind of answer for why these events occur, but I do not. My thoughts and prayers are with anyone affected by this tragedy.