pewpewpew...*proc* PEW PEW PEW PEW PEW

With Hotwingz at 80 now, Jah's taken his main spec to boomkin and is blowing stuff up in feathery rage with me. It's great fun. (Hotwingz is an old friend of his, and was gracious enough to usher at our wedding. He's also a beartank. Know what this guild needs? MORE DRUIDS. CLEARLY.)

I've been putting most of my (admittedly scant) free time into leveling my draenei paladin, Spacebunny. I was considering going dedicatedly ret on her until I realized that tanks and healers spent a hell of a lot less time waiting in the dungeon queue... So from 1-30 I was ret, 30-40 I went Holy, and from 40 to 52-and-counting I've been prot. It's pretty awesome. Leveling Retribution has its advantages - I three-shot most mobs, between crusader procs and a crazy crit rate and just Being A Paladin, and I run pretty fast so non-killing time doesn't last long, but there's just something truly awesome about tanking fifty same-level undead mobs to death and coming out of the deal at full health and mana. (Felstone Field is my bitch.)

I'm thinking of fishing through plugins to find achievement/armory/whatnot things to put in the sidebar, detailing what Jah and I are up to. I may also get in on this Twitter nonsense. Playing - and blogging about it - is fun again.

I ATEN'T DEAD

Long story short, and in bullet points:

-We got married!
-This involved moving into our own apartment.
-Said apartment lacks Teh Intarwebs for a little while longer.
-Also, we're both in college. I'm taking three writing-intensive classes. Epic blogging fail inc.

Upon the release of the Cataclysm trailer, we decided to choose a new medium-pop server and transfer our level 70 druids there, in preparation for rerolling worgen at expansion release. Our original BC and vanilla mains live again! I'm leveling boomkin, something I haven't done much of, and Jah is cat-flavored feral and loving it. 78 and counting.

I need to reinstall WoW on the linux laptop. I deleted it after finding out the repair utility wasn't functioning, which happened after WoW itself developed a case of the permanent critical errors. :(

Eventual regular updating to come!

Running WoW in Ubuntu 9.04...finally!

The secret, I figured out, was to make ABSOLUTELY SURE WiNE was updated to the latest version and then copy my existing WoW folder over from my Windows desktop. No more installation errors!

Someday I'll figure out why Lapcompy hates installing games in Ubuntu. Until then...this is good enough. It's so nice to have a gaming laptop again.

Alts, Alts, Everywhere

Jah and I are going a little alt-crazy at the moment. The ease of acquiring heirloom gear and the ease with which one can level up have contributed, as well as getting a tad tired of our mains.

For myself, there's:
-Jabberwocky, my 80 resto/feral druid. She's pretty decked out from heroics and pickup Naxx10 runs, and I just recently shelled out the 1,000 gold to get her dual-spec in Feral for grinding out Northrend Loremaster.
-Rinhoel, the Obligatory Death Knight. Nearly 61. Thinking of powering her up to be another tanking toon. I <3 Blood spec.
-Einmal and Rhetannie, also known as "The Girls". Respectively a 59 mage and a 59 rogue, and the fruits of my foray into RAF dual-boxing.
-Happybubbles, the level 7 bouncing priest of *doom*. Eventually she'll be a BG twink.

Jah has his own little stable going:
-Kante, his 71 DPS warrior. Not sure if he's Arms or Fury at the moment - they keep swapping the talent trees around so much x.x
-Hoyvakt, the 69 Deathmoo (Tauren death knight). Currently taking Howling Fjord by storm.
-Jahow, 61 hunter and his original toon on the server before transferring Kante and rerolling to Soleine.
-Jandi, 61 mage - one of his RAF experiments. (Looks almost exactly like Einmal.)
-A multitude of sub-50 things he thinks are not worth mentioning. He says he's not sure what, precisely, he wants as his next alt...so he's just slowly leveling one of everything up to 60.

I sort of have a plan. Most of mine have gathering professions, with vague plans for level 80 specs and production profession choices to mesh with their intended roles nicely. Rinhoel, for example, is probably going to end up as either a Blood-spec tank or DPS and will thus have Mining/Blacksmithing instead of her current Mining/Skinning. Jabs (Jabberwocky) is a maxed-out Mining/Jewelcrafter, mainly specializing in tank and healer cuts. Ein will probably end up with tailoring and skinning, and Rhe will probably end up with skinning and leatherworking. I think Bubbles is already an engineer, for PVP fun and rockets.

I think the next one I level will be Rinhoel - after I'm done amusing myself with two dual-specced 80s who have access to a ridiculous number of dailies, funding the next alt's epic flying mount, re-gemming and re-enchanting Besh's tanking gear to within an inch of its life...

Non-alt news: Versus the World completed Heroic: The Antechamber of Ulduar in one night, starting with a one-shot first kill of Kologarn (if you don't count the two hours we spent on him last week >_>) and ending with a stress-soaked, eight-attempt kill of Auriaya at EXACTLY 11:00 PM, our scheduled raid end time. Hopefully, later today will see us down Ignis on heroic for the first time and then waltz into the Keepers of Ulduar section for some fun with Thorim and Hodir. To keep the QQ to a minimum, I'm just going to say that I'm not happy at all with how warrior class mechanics are going, and it's ever so tempting to main-swap to one of the other plate-tank classes.

Cooking, cleaning, and robot-face-smashing.

I've lost my springform pan. You can't make cheesecake without a springform pan! *freakout*

I'm cleaning our office. Jah's back has been giving him troubles, so anything that needs bending/lifting/etc is up to me. The only problem is I hate housecleaning, since I essentially do it for a living - albeit on a ginormous-department-store scale.

XT-002 Deconstructor is kicking our collective butts, but it's just so fun to have actual HARD trash and HARD encounters again that I'm willing to let it slide. :) We've moved from two add tanks and a bosstank to one add tank and one bosstank, with our protadin hitting his holy dual-spec button to fill in on raid heals. Over on the forums, our wonderful and longsuffering raid leader has stepped off his soapbox temporarily to calmly discuss numbers with people and figure out exactly how many DPSers we *really* need to win this fight, and how to balance that against the healing requirement presented by Tympanic Tantrum.

I am again reminded of the irony in being both the tank officer, assistant raid coordinator, and the worst-geared active tank in the entire guild. I'm thinking of resocketing all my expertise/stam gems to straight stamina, or over to def/stam for an avoidance boost. It'd un-dodge-cap me, but it might help me survive boss fights >< Deconstructor can and will kill me in three hits if I don't have immediate stacking and spamming heals, so I've relegated myself to add-tanking and put our blood tank DK on the boss for that fight. On Razorscale (or Razorsnatch, as he's termed on OutofMana) I'm the whirlwinder tank - I taunt the giant vrykul that kill all our melee DPS if we don't keep them the hell out of the two main AOE camps, and the real reason I'm first on the rotation for Razorscale post 50% is I've got the best up-front threat gen of anyone. I really just set the stage for the DK and paladin to continue the fight.

I guess the point is that I'm really unhappy with where both my gear and my class abilities stand, but I don't know if my random boss-induced death is from personal fail or healer fail. Other guilds are using warriors as progression MTs, but we've GOT to have a DK because he's got the most HP and doesn't eat dirt before someone can patch him up!

Argh. I need chocolate.

Edit: Holy run-on sentences, Batman! *grabs a box of punctuation marks, gets to work*

Begin Experiment: Regular posting!

Hello, theoretically-existent readers!

I'm in the process of setting up my Linux laptop with widgets and gizmos and doodads to do things I didn't know I could do, such as update Blogger from a Firefox addon...

I'm going to grab ScribeFire and set a goal to update weekly until the end of the semester, then hopefully move to biweekly during the summer.

Also: WTB [Patch 3.1], PST.

Some non-WoW news.

The wedding planning is going well - just need to narrow down the guest list and finalize invitation design. Right now it's a pencil rough in my sketchpad and needs work.

I'm going to retrieve my SLR camera, umpteen specialized lenses, and old notes on photography and work on expanding my portfolio while I'm living in what is essentially rural farm country. (Local college and associated urban mini-sprawl nonwithstanding.) Looking forward to maybe posting up some pictures here!

(And some WoW news - my druid is nearly 77 and I've just enough money for her epic flight training, I successfully had my guild rank changed to "Cat Herder" a couple weeks ago, and I'm now somewhat in charge of recruiting...healers! As the tank coordinator. The first person I found was immediately rejected because my quick glance at their gear and talents didn't notice a bad spec choice and six pieces of badly enchanted DPS gear. GO ME!)