Repeat after me: You have a problem.

I've still got a 60 day card sitting on the bookshelf. I've promised myself I'm not going to play until Wrath, and even then not until mid-December. But then The Molten Core was released.

Yep. You guessed it.



It was lots of fun, though after some time away I'm pretty sure it needs a bat.

I'm not alone

From MacMerc:

About the only game that became so addictive for me that it started to negatively affect the other aspects of my life has been World of Warcraft. I came to the realization that I was spending too much time leveling up in my artificial, digital life and not nearly enough time achieving and contributing with my real life and I finally gave it up. I still miss it. Even though the quests were repetitive and meaningless, the learning of new and imaginative abilities, the interactions with other players, and the friendships I developed made the game very enjoyable.

Well said. This is why I have a 60 day game time card sitting at home, begging to be used. And to think I spent about $100 extra on my laptop to get a video card that would play WoW easily. *sigh* The trials of an addict.

Will Return Nov. 13th

It's called "Part-time" for a reason, I suppose. Man, you get a lot more free time when you're not playing, though seeing at least five laptops on WoW at the local coffee shop this evening didn't help the addiction much.

Inside Mac Games News: Wrath Of The Lich King Coming November 13th:

Blizzard Entertainment announced today that World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, the second expansion for its award-winning subscription-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game), will arrive in stores on November 13 in North America, Europe, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Russia, and November 14 in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand.

Roots indoors?

Well, this sorta changes everything, doesn't it?

There were some details of class changes (sorry its incomplete, as I mentioned I missed the start of the presentation) but from what I recall:
...
Druids:
Entangling roots will work indoors!
"Flourish" was mentioned but I didn't catch what that did ...

(emph mine)

Rawr: Dr00d gear optimization utility

While googling around to find a list of WoW enchants in XML, I stumbled over Rawr, an application that is designed to help optimize your gear. Here's the description from the site.

Rawr is a program for comparing and exploring gear for Bears, Cats, Moonkin, Warlocks, Mages, Retadins, ProtWarriors, and Healadins, in the MMORPG, World of Warcraft. It is currently in public beta testing, and is being developed by by Astrylian, of US-Eonar. Rawr has been designed from the start to be fun to use, and helpful in finding better combinations of gear, and what gear to find.

It's a Windows app, written in C# for .NET, and at least marginally works in OS X using the Mono project (and, therefore, I assume, Linux). I've played around with it a bit, but have yet to be particularly impressed with its "Moonkin model". The upgrades seem to be all about upping damage without any real consideration for anything else. They should call the model "Clothkin," because that's what you end up with for upgrades. Oh well.

Still, it remains in development, is open source, and I suppose I could get in there and write a Panzerkin model... Might be worth your checking it out, so I thought I'd pass it along!

Hello, hardware

WoW on my iBook doesn't look quite this good (see screenshots). I've retired my Windows tower in the interest of space and in the interest of stealing one stick of its RAM for the Mac Mini, but this kind of detail is making me think about firing it back up. I miss it. My Vostro (with a slightly upgraded video chip) is choppy at times for no good reason, which also stink0rz. Argh, I miss good hardware. It makes WoW a different game.

Attunements made you do your homework

Here's a longish quote from Part-time Druid (huh? Sounds familiar; luckily I think I predate the blog) called "Removing Attunements BAD!", posted in Feb, quite a while before I started ranting that the new, advancement-friendly WoW is a bad idea. Here, the Part Timer shows there are practical reasons to keep things as difficult to attain -- self-training.

So, Black Temple will be open for anyone who wants to enter come patch 2.4. Surely there are hardcore raiding guilds everywhere bemoaning this development, angry that basically anyone with an account can now tread on “their” turf. Well, I can’t evade that argument. It’s true. I can now get together with 24 other guildies and hit Black Temple. It should be fun for us when we wipe in about five seconds, and the fun will surely continue as we wipe over and over and over again. You see, the point of the attunements to these major league instances was twofold. One, it required a good deal of coordination and determination to complete the necessary steps. Two, the “hoops” you had to jump through FORCED you to prepare yourself for what was to come gear-wise.

One might find the same argument works even for new players who blast through the lower levels too quickly.