WoW Music

Well the Cataclysm expansion hit this week. I'm kind of bummed because I can't play it. I've been working on this music article for a while and I think I'm just going to release it now. I want to include some additional songs from each favorite artist, but I'll come back and do that later. Please enjoy!

The wow community has spawned an amazing amount of surprisingly decent music, and in this post I'm going to share my favorite tunes. I've listened to a lot of wow music over the years (yep...it's been years), and I really wanted to bring it all together into one place, somewhat for myself, but I also hope that a few wet-behind-the-ears warcraft newbs might stumble upon this and unlock a treasure trove that took me, well, my entire wow career to discover. I'm going to pick one song per artist, because if I discussed each and every song I like from each artist then this post would simply be too long.

Still QQing After 4.0.1

The much anticipated 4.0.1 patch has finally been released, and I know this not just because I check MMO-Champion as often as a germaphobe washes his hands, but also because the forums are aflame with people asking "which stats r gud nao?" The answers are here, so quit clogging up the boards with your redundant posts! And don't let their modesty fool you, the people over at EJ are mathematical gods. In fact, if they turned their efforts into proving the Unified Field Theory we could all be on a warp ship to Alpha Centauri within the week! Not really. So 4.0.1 has finally come, but don't worry because even in this golden age there are still things to QQ about.

Ruby Sanctum Rogue Lewtz

So apparently patch 3.3.5 is dropping tomorrow and it's bringing us a new raid called "Ruby Sanctum" and something called "Real ID", which I couldn't care less about. I hate social networking and I fear the day our toasters send status updates to our Facebook pages that we just got done toasting a bagel at the "lightly toasted" setting. Anyways, Ruby Sanctum is a lot like Obsidian Sanctum: three minibosses who all drop one badge each, and one main boss, Halion, who drops all the loot. Lets see what rogue loot Halion will be dropping in patch 3.3.5's new raid.

Hunger for Blood Becomes Vendetta

   

A while back Ghostcrawler said that that Hunger for Blood would be going away in Cataclysm, and there was much rejoicing, but we didn't know what its replacement would be. Now, scarcely three weeks from that first announcement information has been released about our new ultimate ability: Vendetta! I've always thought vendetta would be a cool name for a rogue ability, and I was disappointed to find such an awesome moniker was wasted on some stupid DK talent, but apparently Blizzard doesn't care that two spells now share the same name. In this post I'm going to do a critical analysis of this new ability; what I like about it, and what I don't.

Lemon's BG Guide for Rogues Part 1

BGs are a great place to be a rogue. Even if we aren't the killing machines we used to be our stealth and stuns can still go a long way. Some people say honor kills don't win a BG, but I beg to differ. If you can send one or two people back to their gy to have a fun game of "watch the rez timer" then that's two more people who aren't out there defending nodes and capping flags, and that, my friends, is a rogue's specialty.

Gettin' Down in the Dustwallow

I noticed something rather disturbing: I make exactly one blog post a month. Well things 'round here are about to change! Get ready for...two blog posts! I know, I know, my mind is also blown. Not that anyone reads this blog so no one actually cares, but whatever, it's cathartic. Anywho, after I wrote my tanking post I decided to take a break from the dungeon finder. I was tired of gung-ho dps pulling ahead of me, taunting off me, and being all manner of noobish. I had a quest in my log that lead me to Theramore and I began questing there. I fully expected it to be horrible, filled with FedEx style quests telling me to go to Winterspring, come back, then go there again, and then...you get the idea. Surprisingly it was quite smooth...almost...enjoyable!

The Joys of Tanking

I've been a dps and I've been a healer, but up until about two months ago I had never tanked. I rolled a gnome warrior, mostly just to have a gnome warrior, and I started leveling him up. It was alright, except that I died every 10 seconds. I don't remember ever struggling this much to level any other class. On my paladin I could heal myself, and on my rogue things where half-dead before they got out of my stunlock. I understand that warrior leveling used to be even more horrid back in the day when they started you with a sword and board (that's subtle) and Victory Rush, which is now trainable at level 6, wasn't available until level 62.

Rogue PvP Needs an Energy Injection

Okay, now it's time for some serious QQ. As this season has progressed I've noticed that the BGs are not a very rogue-friendly environment (they haven't been for a while now, actually). Our usual tactics kind fall apart against high-resil targets, a meaty opponent forces us to stay out in the open longer, but we don't really have the survivability to do so without ending up dead. Seriously, rogues are the squishiest class in the game. There is no other class that's as easy to kill as a rogue. That's why whenever I'm out of stealth for more than two seconds I get destroyed even with 915 resil and a liberal use of cooldowns.

Need The Orb!

Do you need the orb at the end of the dungeon? Or just greed it trusting that your fellow man will do the same? Well then you're an idiot, but luckily for you Blizz has made rolling for orbs idiot proof! Or ninja proof...depending on how you look at it. I'm just glad the debate is over, I hate when people make a big fuss about something that is so trivial, with a solution that's so simple: need the damn orb! Anyways, now in 3.3.3 you can't need the orb meaning you can only greed or pass, but who would pass? I wish it would just fly into some random person's backpack.

The Perfect Combo Points

Updated for Cataclysm!

The way Blizzard has positioned combo points in the UI is just horrible. Well, actually, the positioning of the target frame is horrible and thus the positioning of your combo points is horrible by extension. A friend of mine rolled a rogue and was asking me where the combo points were. I told him that they're on the target frame, and this caused him to exclaim, "you gotta look up in the corner of your screen all the time!?" to which I said, "yup, pretty much, unless you get a mod." So I thought it would be a good idea to discuss mods that provide you with a movable combo point frame, and tell you which one I like best.

The Plight of the Prot Warrior

Prot specs...specifically those of the warrior and paladin classes...are pretty OP in pvp. I just came out of a wsg about ten minutes ago in which there were three prots on my team, and the horde team had at least one. That's quite an upshot from hardly ever seeing a prot in a bg just a few months ago. I said, "why so many prots?" to which the simple explanation was, "prot is good." I replied, "just like DKs were good?"