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Ninja should win

The other night on Spike tv, they showed an expert(?) analysis for a fight between a ninja and a Spartan warrior.

They claim that the Spartan would win a fight to the deal 65% of the time.

This is stupid, since ninja’s use poison and would never tolerate a face to face fight.

When was the last time you saw a rogue attack a tank head on. That’s just foolish.

story: http://www.spike.com/blog/blood-on-sand-ninja/76628

My rogue is a level 27 Gnome named Torkywingnut.

I recently started the Ravenholdt quest line. It started off being intriguing and mysterious. Then I read the wiki article and my heart sank. Despite being a neat intro to the idea of a thieves guild, the wiki article makes is sound pretty half-baked with no real reward (unless you want the Insane in the Membrane achievement).

I’m disappointed that Blizzard would put something like this in and abandon it. Which makes me think the old world needs some love.

I realize that Blizzard needs to build new areas to sell expansions. I’ve also heard rumblings that they are losing subscribers. Weekends don’t feel as crowded to me. Below is a moderately thoughtful list of changes to revitalize the old world and bring players back.

1. Make travel from Northrend and Outland easier. How about more portals from the old world?

2. Put some new quests in the old world – new characters still start there

3. Let max level players earn a new kind of emblem for mentoring lower level chars through the old world – let them earn legacy items that their alts can use

4. Pill in gaps in the old world so flying mounts could be used. Put some level 65+ quests in the new high altitude area. Cloud Castles and big giants.

I was playing a Death Knight, killing lots of Scarlet Crusaders the other day, when it hit me. Wrath is just like Empire Strikes Back.

Stay with me here.

1. They both start in place filled with Ice.

2. You get attacked constantly.

3. You take part in huge battles with cool vehicles.

4. You are related to a big bad dude, who wears black and talks with a deep voice.

5. The bad guy has mysterious magical powers.

6. The bad dude has a big glowing sword and commands thousands of troops.

7. There is swampy forest that has small creatures with funny voices.

8. There is a floating city in the clouds (Dalaran / Cloud City). If you step off the ledge, you go splat.

9. If you play the hero, then the big bad dude is your father (sort of).

10. [edit] They both made absurd amounts of money on the opening weekend.

What am I missing??

Well…I can’t get my voice recognition to work with my Logitech mic. Since I mostly play while my daughter is asleep, I don’t want to shout. It seems that Apple’s Speakable Items likes their mic better than mine. WTF??

If you wonder where I’ve been, log in to WOW. Sheesh. Have you done the seasonal quests? Been a zombie? I actually helped kill the headless horseman and they let me get the epic ring. My first epic!!.

So please forgive me if this blog has suffered. Feel free to comment

Hey did you know Wrath of the Lich King is officially released on Thursday. Even though I heard that 7/11 already had it

p.s. The Realms have been down all day, so this is a good time for you to read blogs

Path 3.0.2 is out and it’s huge. It seems to change everything. What’s your take?

Welcome to top of the world

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So this weekend, I had aspired to performing a number of speech tests. Unfortunatly, my iMac had a conniption and I had to reload the hard drive. Sigh.

I spent about a day and a half reloading tons of stuff. My download folder is gone. Lots of fun stuff there.

My birthday was Sunday, so I managed to get online and visit with some nice folks. We all waited to do a run in the Underbog, but we could not get the group together. Oh well.

I got an iPod touch 2g 16GB – I’ll be posting and commenting on the wow apps i’ve found soon

yeah!

Kurn out!

Big bird

This weekend my Druid Eillebill hit level 68 and gained Flight Form! I’ve wanted this since level 32, but it’s even better than I imagined. I can hit a hot-key and poof I’m flying. No delay time like my mount. I can float in the air indefinitely. Pretty cool.

While you can’t become a bird in combat, you can swoop in, bug someone and fly off. I suspect that if I get hit hard enough, I’ll be forced to change, but that has not been the case with other forms. As long as you are not touching the ground, most things can’t hit you (Fel Cannons being an big exception. Yes. You can be shot down.)

One thing that has been super cool is the cherry picking you can do on herbs. I just turn on my detect herbs ability and fly over an area. When the little yellow blip appears, I swoop from the sky at terminal velocity. I grab the herbs and take off. Often times, the local mobs don’t even bother me, or I can fly back up before it gets messy.

So what’s the biggest annoyance. The head on the flight form looks like a werewolf with sideburns.

Ordinarily, I would have skipped this, but OMG Some lady down the street from Blizzard South got a $100k research grant??!

It gets better: The National Science Foundation is funding research to see why US players use more mods/plug ins than asian players.

If someone gave me $50, I’d tell them that gold farmers in the east use fewer plugins becuase that would take time away from work.

On the other hand, Bonnie Nardi is a faculty member in the Department of Informatics in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. She’s published two papers on WOW already.
Learning Conversations in World of Warcraft (2007)

Strangers and Friends: Collaborative Play in World of Warcraft (2006)

and she blogs (see her post about Shat).

Nonetheless. I say, “$100k if a professor’s salary at some schools.” Did she just pay the rent for her department? If I had $100k, I’d pay my debts off and take my family to Disneyland (with a possible stop off at Blizzard headquarters in Irvine, CA.

Kurn out

The omniscient folks at WOW insider have unearthed a frightening shocking amazing factoid. Pre-orders of the Collector’s Edition of Wrath of the Litch King are sold out at GameStop and Amazon.

Ok, close your mouth. You knew people wanted this stuff. In case you missed it, that’s 2 days. Modona doesn’t sell tickets that fast.

WOW insider mentioned that Blizzard likes to limit the run on Collector’s Editions, but still. This is Crack People! Crack I say.

In case you have been living under a rock (or in Iraq), Wrath of the Litch King has an offically announced release date. I know this because Blizzard is taking pre-orders

Rest assured, there will be bugs opportunities to refine and retool the game, and lots of content will be added a year later (cough cough Burning Crusades cough cough).

It seems like a bit of a scam to me that they can sell you an expansion and then keep adding to it while charging you every month. Sigh. go blizzard go.