Blog Revived

 
I know it has been many months since my last post stating I would return to this blog.  Well, that was going into the summer season and I should have known I wouldn’t keep up with it like I intended.  It is now late into the month of October.  The weather has cooled and the rainy, grey skies of fall weather are upon us.  So what’s new?  Glad you asked.

In the World of Warcraft, things have received a great shake up with the impending Cataclysm coming ever near.  I am not going so far as to say my favorite class and raiding spec is broken, but it is close.  I am of the mind that competitive raiding and PvP action is over for WotLK content as the game begins the transition to Cataclysm content and mechanics.  The game has definitely changed and we all know that change is hard for many people to easily accept.  I have a rough time with change myself unless I am coached or otherwise helped to prepare for change.  I told myself that the new patch was called 4.0.x for a reason, and that is because it is WoW 4.0.  WoW 3.x.x concepts and mechanics are now a thing of the past.  I will most likely cut back on my WoW hours while things are in the midst of changing.  Another reason for a raiding break is that after trying to raid ICC25 last night was very little fun at all due to many different bugs and technical issues.  I had to turn the sound off while raiding due to the bad sound delay issues that are known.  The work-a-rounds that are posted such as disabling Death Knight voice effects, making sure the sound wasn’t set to system default in the WoW interface, and even reducing the hardware acceleration on my sound driver didn’t work. 

My place of work is also under going changes.  The upper management has seen fit to reorganize some of the gaming floor space.  The room we currently utilize as our comfortable and quite poker room has now been designated as a new area for high limit e-game (slot) machines.*  The poker room is to be eventually moved to another room with slightly less floor space which is fine as we never ran at full capacity in our current setup except maybe once during a tournament series.  Notice how I said “eventually”?  They haven’t even begun converting the new space for the poker room to suit our needs.  So where does that leave us until they finish?  We will be right in the middle of the open gaming floor in the midst of all the noise and smoke.  The only positive I can find in this situation is that we might draw a couple of extra players who just walk up, see the tables, and think to themselves, “Gee, that doesn’t look too hard.  I can take them.”  We will definitely lose many of our regular players who have grown accustomed to the smoke-free and quite atmosphere we provide with our room even if it is just a temporary situation.

That about covers many of the changes I’ve experience during my absence from the blog.  In my next few posts, I will cover some things I am definitely looking forward to with the release of the Cataclysm expansion in WoW.  Until then, good journey!

New Blog

Hi all!  As most of you have noticed my blogging activity has dropped over the past couple of months.  Raquoon had the idea of combining our blogs so that maybe between the two of us and some contributions from others we will have a blog that is active and entertaining.  The blog is called Myth Journals.  Most of my WoW blogging will be done over there.

Before I go, I want to leave with one last video posting.  This has quickly become one of my favorite WoW videos.  It is a music video parody of the song “Don’t Trust a Me” by  3Oh!3.  It was recently featured on WoW.com on the Moviewatch section.  Enjoy!

/sleep

That is all I just want to do after this last week.  This past week has just been brutal.  It is also the reason for the lack of updates to this blog as of late.  I noticed that I went all of last week without posting anything.  It has been a combination of putting in overtime at work and trying to enjoy some other activities outside of WoW.

The last couple of days at work have been absolute tests of endurance.  We are currently understaffed and business has still been strong despite heading into the summer months.  These factors contributed to me having to put in loads of extra hours which really wasn’t by choice.  I ended up working twelve hours two days in a row plus a regular shift on Sunday.  They tried calling me in early yesterday because they were short handed, but I was so exhausted I just couldn’t make it until my regularly scheduled time.

The time I have spent logged into the game haven’t been spent as well as I would have liked but still got some things done.  My rogue has finally gotten around to participating in the Argent Tournament which I have found to be pretty cool.  I have to wonder how this works lore-wise though as in just how inept do the Lich King’s forces have to be to allow the Argent Crusade to host a jousting tournament in what is basically the Lich King’s front yard?  My paladin hasn’t been logged on in about a week.  I have come to a small realization that tanking raids and heroics just isn’t for me.  I really do like the AoE grinding my paladin can do as it is an awesome way to farm meats for cooking.  Finally, as for my priest she is still leveling and about to reach the 50′s, but due to my lack of play time she has fallen behind my buddy Raq’s paladin alt by ten levels.  Maybe I can do some catching up this week while he should be working.

What did they just say?!

Here are some amusing, if not random, things I overheard at work last night.  It just seemed to be one of those nights for people.

 

While riding the elevator that’s prone to breakdowns with a co-worker:
Co-worker: “This has got to be the noisiest elevator ever.  I mean, just look at that sound.”

 

A guy trying to give his girlfriend alittle affection while at the table:
Boyfriend: “I just wanted to give you some love’in.”
Girlfriend: “But, just not in the ear.”

 

One of the pit bosses asked a dealer to do something who replied with “just a sec”:
Pitboss:  “ You always say that.  I am tired on waiting on secs.  From now on, no more secs.”

 

Same couple from earlier:
Girlfriend:  “You messed up my hair!  I don’t love you anymore.”
Players laugh.  Boyfriend walks off laughing as well.
Girlfriend:  “We have such a shallow relationship.”

 

And finally, this last one takes alittle bit to explain.   We dealers keep our tips in a lockbox that we carry with us from table to table.  The lockbox has a small window so you can see what is inside.  We mostly get $1 chips tossed our way as tips.  The $1 chips are white.  Some dealers color up five white chips to one $5 red chip and drop the red chip.  Others don’t which resulted in this comment made by a guest to one of my co-workers:
“Your box has the most white stuff in it I have ever seen.”

Once more into the breach dear friends.

Please excuse lateness of this post today.  Last night, we went back into Naxxramas instead of butting our heads against the wall that is Heroic Ulduar.  Ulduar has seemingly come as a shock to a great many of people in how difficult it is compared to entry level WotLK raids.  Of course, we’re going into Ulduar tonight and later on this week.  The idea of going back into Heroic Naxx last night was to get more people gear and even minor upgrades just so we’re that much stronger.  I believe we’re pretty close gear wise to being ready for Ulduar.  Our downside is that none of us played on the PTR so the fights in Ulduar are extremely new territory for us as they are for a lot guilds out there.  Watching videos and reading boss kill strats can only take you so far.  My preferred method of learning something is through tactile style, or in other words by “doing” the task at hand.  The mechanics of this game being what they are, failure equals loss of gold, mats, and time, then there’s the incentive of learning very quickly.  I put an even further motivation on myself by telling myself that, “Sure, I have plenty of gold to wipe on this all day if need be, but my guildmates don’t so I need to learn how to do this quickly.”  That is my motivation for a fight.

Heroic Naxxramas was on the agenda for last night.  We had some good moments in there with some very nice upgrades for people.  Plague and Spider wings were cake.  For some odd reason last night, Patchwerk was giving us trouble.  We haven’t had issues on Patchwerk in weeks.  We were very melee heavy last night.  In fact, at one point we had a grand total of five rogues in the raid!  I haven’t seen that many rogues in a raid since TBC.  Another rogue and I were doing what I think was standard to fair dps, another was doing slightly less, but a new rogue we picked up was leaving us and a couple of our other elite dps’ers in the dust.  I wonder that if we’re going to have that many rogues around in the future for 25 man raids, then it would really be a good time to try the Honor Among Thieves build.  I know they fixed that exploit bug a patch or so ago, but I’ve heard quite about about how fun it is and that any subtlety build breaks up the monotony of combat and mutilate builds.

It was decided to leave Heroic Naxx for another night and head into OS really quick before we called it a night.  We were short a full 25 man raid so we didn’t attempt any drakes up, but we stilled downed him with no problems.  I thought it might have just been me, but the flame walls appeared to be bugged.  They would rise up, disappear, then reappear just as they moved over the small little island you fight on.  It still cracks me up that Deadly Boss Mods has been programmed to the play the Big Bad Wolf’s quote from the Opera event in Karazahn whenever the flame wall comes through, “Run away little girl!”

So tonight we hopefully have enough for Heroic Ulduar and at least get Lootmobile down.  Anything after that would just be gravy.  I, unfortunately, have to go into work as it is our usual Wednesday night Poker tournament.  I am hoping I get to go home early as I am still pretty exhausted from all the hours I worked over the weekend.  I know I planned on writing some poker articles in here, but right now I am kind of burned out on it so bad that I would rather not think about poker if I don’t have to.  It doesn’t help my mood any when all the players have to analyze every single hand they just played at the tables.  Why can’t these guys just say, “Nice hand” and just move on?  Anyways, I’ll stop there before this turns into a rant about work.

Off Week

No raiding update from last night as I wasn’t there.  I actually haven’t logged into the game in the past couple of days.  For one, Spring weather has finally come to the area so I’ve been spending more time outdoors bike riding, rollerblading, hitting golf balls, and yard work.  Trying to mow the yard yesterday ended up being quite a hassle.  First off the battery in my mower was dead so I had to go out for a new one.  After I got that taken care of, a pin that holds the lever that controls the blade deck height fell out causing the blades on the right side to hit bottom.  Left a nasty spot of scalped grass in my front yard.

Another activity that’s kept me from raiding in the evenings, apart from work of course, is an upcoming Taekwondo demonstration I am participating in at the local Dogwood Festival.  It is always a lot of fun and hopefully the weather stays nice.  In the past, it has come a big storm on the day we were supposed to perform forcing us to cancel the demonstration. 

I have noticed that my lack of play time has been catching up on my toon’s gold reserves last week.  When I did log on to WoW, I only logged on to raid.  No dailies, no farming, no leveling an alt.  So a combination of buying raiding mats and of course getting the dual spec talent really put a kink my rogue’s wallet.  Oh well, maybe after this week I can get back in the swing of things.

Busy Week and Shameless Plug

I had set Wednesdays aside for recapping what happened during last night’s raid, but unfortunately I wasn’t able to raid last night.  I did manage to log on later on in the evening to find that the guild had basically breezed through three wings of Heroic Naxxramas.  The downside is though that the construct quarter seems to be our bane.  Don’t fret guys, we’ve still got all week to get it down starting with tonight.

With that said, I will be unavailable to raid all week actually.  Today starts a six day work week for me.  The reason being is we are hosting a poker tournament series starting tomorrow night.   These tournament events are a blast.  If you happen to be in the NE Oklahoma area, or looking for an idea for a weekend getaway, then come on by for a visit.  Here is a  complete tournament schedule of our events.  ( Warning!  Link requires you to be able to read .pdf  files.  I don’t like Adobe, but I didn’t build the website.)

First Deal, First Cut

Hi all!  Welcome to my blog.  Please make yourself comfortable.  May I get you a pillow?  Cup of hot chocolate?  Anyways, excuse the crudeness of this blog as I get started out.  I’m having difficulty picking a theme I like that is easy to read and navigate.  I guess all blogs have to start somewhere.

So, why have I started a blog such as this?  Good question. 

First, I was mostly impressed and greatly inspired by the blogging of a now former WoW guildmate, Kyrilean, who has recently transferred servers seeking a fresh start from experiencing burnout and a guild whose raid times are more line with his time zone.  I hated to see him leave the guild <ICESTORM>.  He plays the most dependable Holy spec’d Paladin I know.  Never had to worry about the tank going down during a boss fight with him in the raid due to insufficient healing.  I wish him the best of luck in his new server and guild!

Second, my goal with this blog is to hopefully post helpful information from things I’ve learned in two activities I enjoy doing; dealing poker and playing a rogue in World of Warcraft.  Apart from dealing poker, I also spent my fair share of playing poker as well although in the past few months I admittedly haven’t played very much.  In WoW, I have alts of other classes too such as a paladin that is about to reach level 80 and a low level priest (as well as other low level alts) but I always think of myself as a rogue first and foremost.  I don’t know why, but the class just resonated with me even when I first started playing WoW and didn’t know much about the game.  Must be the masks us rogues get to wear, makes us look dashing.

So here’s to my fellow card dealers, casino employees, rogues, and WoW players, these “cuts” are for you.