WoW Psychology & Philosophy - Intro

For a while now I have been putting a great deal of thought into this topic. I'd like to take my field of study, psychology, and start to put it into a WoW perspective. It always seems weird to put words like "games" in the same sentence with "psychology", "sociology" or "philosophy", but the more I play and read the more I find it fascinating.

The Shattering - Some quick thoughts and observations on 4.0.3a

I mounted up and decided to go on walk-about across Azeroth. In no particular order.

4.0.1 Random Thoughts

Some of it is awesome some of it I just don't understand. 4.0.1 has turned a lot of things upside down. My lock is full of awesome fiery goodness. I love feeling like I'm burning the hell out of things again! My warrior is totally weird. I've had some conversations with another prot warrior about stats and such and I'm trying to re-tune my brain to the new stats and it's just not sinking in. I think I'm just over tanking. Speaking of, I have had a lot of asshole tanks lately. I don't know what it is. Perhaps they think they can ramrod through instances still, I don't know. Perhaps it's because the toons I'm taking into instances lately are not tier 10 geared like most of these folks are. Either way its been pretty fucking annoying.

My poor new 80 healer is still trying to catch up. I'm just starting to figure out disc again by the way. Very weird concept of damage=healing and mana regen. It works but I'm still working out rotational stuff. I am doing this blind. I know what's going on, but I am not looking up rotation info anywhere so I'm making it up. Seems to be coming along, albeit slowly. I am enjoying the challenge for the most part but my husband has had to listen to me yell at tanks a lot more these last few days. I'm taking the hard road I know, don't tell me please :p

Let's see...what else is up with this patch? The glyphs are pretty cool, though I have found there can just be a tremendous amount of choices. That is good and bad. I wonder if I'm picking the "right" one. I'm sure some asshole will tell me eventually what the "right" one is.
Talent choices in some trees seem limited and in some others don't. For example, my warrior seems to have a lot of choices in fury or arms trees that would help with prot. My warlock does not seem to have as many cool things for destro in other trees. She also doesn't seem to have as many cool glyph choices as say my priest. I think it's more difficult to get diversity out of the pure dps classes then it is the hybrids or partial hybrids. Warlocks, mages, hunters and rogues are going to find they are more limited in, as Ghostcrawler says, "cool choices" to make.
All in all I am excited about the patch. With the changes to threat reduction talents in dps and the promise of CC down the line, I can't wait to get my claws into some new instances.

Blizzcon 2010 - Short and Sweet

Since I'm writing so late about this I figured most everything you could want has already been covered. So I'm just going to include a short article I wrote that was read on TNB Blogcast episode 106.

I don't have much else to add. It was great to attend the panels, walk around the vendor booths and be at Blizzcon in person. There is not a whole lot of Cata news to share that isn't out there already.

When Fim asked me to write about Blizzcon for the show I was at a loss as to what to write about. It didn't take very long for me to narrow down the topic. I found that the best part of Blizzcon for me was meeting everyone. Not only Fimlys, Nibuca and Hydra, but oodles and oodles of people that all wanted to do the same thing. Talk about and experience Blizzcon, Blizzard and WoW. I am lucky to have a husband who plays, as well as some friends at work. I always have people around to "geek out" with. Blizzcon though, brought a whole nother level. Walking down the streets of Anaheim and listening to people espouse about ganking or being ganked, nerfed or buffed was a unique and awesome experience. Knowing that I was surrounded by 25,000 other people that think and speak the same way I do, and are as excited about WoW as I am, was something I will never forget. I remember turning to my husband and saying..."It's meh people!". Truth be told it really is. Rarely have I felt as much a part of a community as I did that weekend.
I think what made the experience come together though, were the plans and meet-ups that happened off the convention floor. I don't think I would have had as much fun if it wasn't for the rest of the Twisted Nether crew. If you ever have a chance to go to any of the meet-ups, and I mean any meet-up at all, do it!! Fight the nerd urge to be shy or introverted and go. You will not regret it.
Blizzard didn't have much news for us WoW'ers this year. The panels were kinda lackadaisical, and all the info and trailers for Cataclysm are already out. There was nothing there that could not have been bought on-line somewhere or viewed over the webs or satellites for a nominal fee. What you couldn't get any other way was the camaraderie.