The Stories of O

Im not proud of the time that I have spent in Cataclysm.Im not proud of the fact that I went through three different guilds, to get to the one that Im currently in and that I dont know how long I will remain with this one, either.  Im not proud of the fact that theres a huge three month gap in my activity, due to burnout, which led me to try other games and to pursue other avenues.

I forgot to do a lot of things today.I forgot to e-mail Ophelie, to let her know which dates and times I was free this week, so we could record the next episode of our podcast.  I forgot about the birthday brunch that Im due to attend on Sunday morning and that I will need to buy a birthday gift and a card for.

When you achieve Revered status with the Avengers of Hyjal faction, you are able to purchase 5 new trinkets from Naresir Stormfury, the Quartermaster for that particular faction in the Molten Front.  Only 2 of these trinkets seem geared for casters and while they may not seem to be the obvious upgrades that the trinkets directly from the Firelands instance are, they are still worth taking a look at and possibly even equipping.Lets take a look at how the Fiery Quintessence and the Rune of Zeth stack up against each other.  Are they worth taking?  Why or why not?The real difference between these two trinkets is not the amount of consistent stats that you get from them – the 383 Spirit from the Quintessence and the 383 Critical Strike from the Rune – but the amount of Intellect that you get from the on-use effect, the duration of the effect, and the cooldown of each trinket.  These three factors are what set these trinkets apart from one another and will help you decide which one is right for you.  The initial stats that they come with will play a part in this decision, but not nearly as much as the on-use effect will.Lets start off with exploring the proc a bit further.The Quintessence gives you 1149 Intellect for 25 seconds, with a 1 minute and 30 second cooldown.  From looking at the logs for my groups collective boss kills in Firelands, the average boss fight lasts about 5 minutes.  Using a formula that I picked up from the forums over at AskMrRobot, we will take a look at how much overall Intellect that proc will give you, if used properly.4 x 25 / 300 = 33%We will start by converting a 5 minute boss fight into seconds, which is 300 seconds.  Assuming that you use the Quintessence on the pull, you will then be able to use it at the 90 second mark, the 180 second mark, and the 270 second mark.  The fight will end at 300 seconds, meaning it will end before your next chance to use the trinket, which would be at the 360 second mark.  Overall, you will be able to use the trinket 4 times.  The buff that you receive from the Quintessence lasts 25 seconds.  So, the formula goes like this:# of times the trinket is used x  duration of the effect / duration of the fight, in seconds = percentage of overall Intellect gained over the course of an encounterThe on-use effect from the Quintessence gives you 1149 Intellect.  33% of this is 379 Intellect (rounded down).  So, if you use the trinket when you are supposed to, you can expect to have an average 379 Intellect, overall on a 5 minute encounter.  This gives you more Intellect than other trinkets with a flat amount of Intellect on them, like the Darkmoon Card: Tsunami or the Vibrant Alchemist Stone, and even comes close to giving you the same amount of Intellect as newer trinket, such as the Jaws of Defeat or the Eye of Blazing Power.Those calculations were for what is considered to be a short fight.  Lets see how the Fiery Quintessence stacks up on a longer fight, like on Ragnaros.  Our average attempts on Ragnaros lasted about 9 minutes, which converts to 540 seconds.  I would use the trinket at the pull, then at the 90 second mark, the 180 second mark, the 270 second, the 360 second, and the 450 second.  Because the fight would presumably end at the 540 second mark, I will assume that I wont pop the trinket at that point, because the fight will already be over and I should have to do too much healing at that point.  So, I will be using the trinket 6 times on the Ragnaros encounter.  The formula will now look like this:6 x 25 / 540 = 27%1149 x 27% = 310 IntellectOn a longer fight, the amount of overall Intellect was much less than most trinkets that you would otherwise have available to you, even ones from a tier behind the current one.  So, for Ragnaros, I would probably use one of my other trinkets instead of this one.  If Im healing a shorter encounter, like Alysrazor or Bethtilac, I would probably use the Fiery Quintessence, but not for longer encounters that could go well beyond 5 or 6 minutes or even up to 9 or 10 minutes.We have seen what the Fiery Quintessence can do and how much it can help you on shorter encounters, but what about the Rune of Zeth?  Does the fact the Rune of Zeth gives you more Intellect make it more desirable than the Quintessence?  Lets crunch those numbers and see! While the Rune of Zeth may give you 1277 Intellect, over the Quintessences 1149, the on-use effect only lasts for 15 seconds, instead of 25 seconds.  The Rune also comes with a one minute cooldown, as opposed to the 90 second cooldown from the Quintessence.  Because of these things, the formula is going to look a bit different.  Assuming that we have the Rune of Zeth equipped, instead of the Fiery Quintessence, on a 5 minute fight, the formula will look like this:5 x 15 / 300 = 25%You would use the Rune immediately on the pull, then at the 60 second mark, the 120 second, the 180 second, and the 240 second mark.  Again, the fight would end at the 300 second mark, and you would probably not need to pop the trinket and continue healing once the fight is over.  You would get to use the Rune 5 times during this encounter.  5 times, multiplied by the 15 second duration of each effect, divided by the 300 second duration of the encounter gives you 25% of the on-use effect in Intellect, overall.1277 x 25% = 319 IntellectAs you can see, this is much less than what the Fiery Quintessence would give you, on a fight that lasts for the same amount of time.  You were getting more Intellect with each use and you were able to use the trinket one more time, but the duration of the effect was 10 seconds shorter each time.  This led to a lower uptime of the buff being active, which cut into your overall Intellect gained.  Now, lets see how the Rune of Zeth works on a longer fight, like our 9 minute Ragnaros encounter.You would use the Rune of Zeth on the pull, then at the 60 second mark, the 120 second, the 180 second, the 240 second, the 300 second, the 360 second, the 420 second, and the 480 second mark.  The fight would end at 540 seconds and the trinket should not need to be popped again.  This means you would be able to use the Rune of Zeth 9 times on a 9 minute encounter.  Your formula should look like this:9 x 15 / 540 = 25%Interesting.  You still get 25% of the Intellect from the Rune of Zeths on-use effect during a 9 minute encounter, as you would during a 5 minute encounter.  That would give you 319 Intellect, as opposed to the 310 Intellect you would get from the Fiery Quintessence on the same fight.  While both are still well below what other trinkets can give you, the Rune of Zeth would give you more in this situation.What I choose to take away from this is that in terms of raw Spell Power, the Fiery Quintessence appears to be better, but only for fights with a short duration.  Longer fights will not give you the overall Intellect that other trinkets would and would result in a loss of Spell Power.  If youre looking at either of these two trinkets for regen purposes, its safe to say that discipline priests will probably want the Rune of Zeth (as the slightly larger amount of Intellect on there will help them with Rapture, which is based on your total amount of mana at the time) and holy priests would want to stick with the Fiery Quintessence (as we get more from raw Spirit, due to Holy Concentration).While there are certainly better trinkets in Firelands, itself and even in the up coming Dragon Soul raid, it never hurts to keep your options open and to swap out trinkets, as needed between fights.  Until I can get my hands on better, I have no problem equipping a Fiery Quintessence and seeing what kind of results I can produce.  Hopefully, Ive given you all something to think about and maybe you will even consider trying one of these wonderful trinkets out, the next time you swing by the Avengers of Hyjal Quartermaster.A huge thank you to the folks over at AskMrRobot, for the fantastic information and formulas that were given on the thread that I linked above.  Feel free to give their site a try sometime an
d see how your gear and build look, according to their calculations.  You just might be surprised at what you find there.  I know I was!

Since Ive started playing World of Warcraft again, I have been spending quite a bit of time in Randoms.  I did them the first two weeks that I came back, so I could make sure that I was Valor Point capped, because I wasnt raiding and had no other way to earn those points, otherwise.  I am doing them now that my priest is raiding, because I have recently dusted off my level 82 shaman and have been having an absolute blast healing with her in Randoms and leveling that way.You start to pick up on trends or interesting personality types when you do a lot of Randoms.

I stayed up way later than I should have, the night that the nominations for the Stopies awards were announced.  Secretly, I was hoping that my podcast, the one that I co-host and that I enjoy making with Ophelie would somehow have attracted enough attention to warrant being nominated for one of the many awards being given away by the crew of the Stopcast.  I got there just in time to hear who was all nominated and to hear which award I, personally, was being nominated for:  Biggest Drama Queen.At first, it started out being something that I was proud of.

My site ended up unexpectedly being shut down for a couple of hours yesterday, so I do apologize if anyone tried to read anything that I have here and was unable to do so.  Needless to say, it was quite a wild ride! It all started a couple of weeks ago, when I started receiving some feedback from my friends and readers that my site was showing up on their antivirus software as possibly having malicious content, specifically a Trojan.  I have only been self hosted for a few short months, so I dont know too much on the subject or the inner workings of things.  I ran a full scan on my computer, which turned up nothing and then I called BlueHost, who hosts my website and asked what they could do about this.  The man from technical support ran a scan on his end, also found nothing malicious on my page and told me that if I could provide evidence of these alerts or of the malicious software that BlueHost could investigate further. I put out the call for people to send me some screenshots of what the man asked for and a very dear friend sent me an e-mail the other day with exactly what I needed.  I immediately shipped that off to BlueHost and awaited their response.  Near the end of my work day, I received two e-mails from BlueHost, one telling me that they had found a large amount of malware in my site and had created a folder with all of the information about it in there.  The second e-mail was from the Terms of Service department, telling me that a third party sent them a complaint about the malware on my site and that they determined that I was phishing, which is a violation of the Terms of Service.  Because of this infraction, they were going to deactivate my site and give me 15 days to contact them and get the matter resolved, or else they would potentially delete anything that they are hosting of mine. I called the Terms of Service department and they basically blamed everything on me.  They denied any responsibility for the malware getting through and told me that it is my job to monitor my site and make sure that it remains free of such things.  They denied any knowledge of promises that were made to investigate or clean up the site further and were unsure why someone in their technical support department would make such claims.  I was given the name of two third party companies that would be happy to help me clean up my site and help keep it clean, all of course for a low monthly fee.  Needless to say, I was pissed.  I didnt know any of this.  I assumed that by paying them to host my site, that they were also going to keep it safe.  There was never any indication that they did not automatically provide this service to me and this was the first time I had ever been offered the services of other companies to do such things.  It never came up until now.  Terms of Service wrapped up the call by stating that they would be happy to reactivate my site, if I could show them that the site was free of all malware and other potentially suspicious software and they would wait to hear my response on this.  I didnt know where to begin.  One of my friends offered his assistance with this and we sat on Vent together and figured out what to do.  I gave him the information that would allow him to access my control panel through BlueHost, to see what he could do.  Mind you, I wouldnt suggest you do this for just anyone, but these were desperate times and I really felt I could trust him.  As he is working on cleaning up my site, he was surprised to discover that nearly a dozen phishing sites or companies had basically taken up residence on my server.  Some of them were masquerading as tax companies or well known banking institutions.  It was an impressive feat and certainly not something done by amateurs. After he felt like he had cleared everything malicious out, I called BlueHost to see if my site met with their approval and if my blog could be reactivated.  The man on the line said I still had three pieces of malware remaining that they would like to see removed.  Let me get this right – they can tell me where the malware is and what it is, but they cant remove it?  How does that work?  Again, its not their job.  Or at least thats the way they see things.  So, I dragged my friend back on Vent and he removed the last three pieces of malware, to BlueHosts satisfaction.  Minutes later, my site was reactivated and everything appeared to be back to normal.I walked away from this experience feeling paranoid and confused.  How on earth did this happen?  I have always prided myself on being smart about my web surfing and my online shenanigans.  I dont open attachments Im not sure of.  I dont give out my password to strangers.  I use authenticators.  I run virus scans often.  I dont unscreen comments that look suspicious.  I dont download porn from sites that I dont trust and that arent secure.  I would like to think Im a smart person, in that regards.  I also dont know how to prevent this from happening again.  I really assumed that I would be safe, that my host would keep me safe.  That didnt happen.  My friend and several others offered me hosting on their spaces and Im seriously considering taking them up on this.  I dont need massive amounts of storage or numerous e-mail addresses.  I just want to feel safe.  I want to know that I can have a site up and running thats not going to negatively affect those who try to read it or that will negatively affect me.  I didnt even know something like this was possible. So Im trying not to give this too much thought and move on.  Im still trying to determine where Im going to end up, come 4.3.  I havent had any luck finding any runs in my current guild or group that are looking for healers or that would have me back (after the whole me refusing to go discipline fiasco), so Im having to take my business elsewhere.  I had one guild interview last night that I thought went well and I have had a few offers from others, too.  I really want to make sure I do it right this time and that I find a group that I enjoy first and that I can progress with second.  Before, it was the other way around and I realize that maybe that wasnt the best way to go about things.  I have learned that and Im still learning other things, too.  I just need to find the right group that is willing to learn with me and possibly even teach me a few things, too.

Im your biggest fan. Ill follow you until you love me.- Lady Gaga, Paparazzi.Because I am such a flirtatious personality, I do tend to attract people who like to banter with me by using innuendos and other forms of potentially sexual dialogue.  Once in a while, I will attract the attention of someone who seems to think Im interesting and would like to do something about it.

Theres nothing noble about being poor.- Brian Kinney, Queer As FolkThis afternoon, I was on my lunch break when my Twitter feed suddenly exploded with Tweets talking about a new companion pet at the Blizzard Store and how people thought it was a bad idea.  Now, most people tend to get really excited at the idea of a new pet being introduced to the game, so I couldnt figure out why this one had everyone up in arms.  I asked for more information, before heading back to the office and discovering this announcement:Q: How does the Guardian Cub pet work? How is it different from other Pet Store pets?Unlike the other Pet Store companions, the Guardian Cub is a tradable, one-time-use pet that permanently binds to a single character upon use.

I took a moment yesterday to catch up with an old friend from my World of Warcraft days, whom I consider to be a respected authority and someone that I have a lot of love and respect for.  At some point in the conversation, I mentioned that I felt a whole lot more comfortable with the idea of healing as a discipline priest, when she added that she was starting to learn how to be a shadow priest.  I couldnt help but laugh at the thought of the two of us both trying things that were so outside of our comfort zones and imagining how well each endeavor would ultimately pan out. This got me thinking about just how flexible healers should be.  In World of Warcraft, each healing class has the ability to perform other roles, as well.  Druids and paladins can tank or DPS.  All 4 classes can do DPS.  Priests could also choose to heal one of two ways.  I admit that I didnt really understand the need to be flexible and how important it was until I started playing Rift.  Maybe this is because the idea of performing multiple roles is something that was ingrained into the game from the start and not something that was added in later.  I knew going into Rift that this would be expected of me and so I took to it much easier than I did before.  I think it also helped that I was so overwhelmingly curious about all of the potential souls that I didnt want to settle for having just one set of three souls.  I wanted to try a little of everything and did not want to feel tied to just one role.While I had become more comfortable with the idea of being a general healer and not being defined by one spec, I was less comfortable with the idea of being asked to tank or DPS, when needed.  During the last couple of raids, I have felt incredibly bored.  I feel as if either my group takes too many healers or the ones that we do have perform so well that there isnt really anything to do.  Some healers are asked to go DPS because of this and this is something that I dont feel comfortable enough to volunteer to do.  Even when we reduce our healing roster, I still dont feel like I have enough to do.  I dont feel like there is imminent danger coming from a lack of healing.  Im really and truly bored.Things kind of came to a head last night, during one of our farm nights.  I think we were running the bare minimum of healers that we needed to clear the zone and I still had very little to do.  Some people are fine with that, but I am not one of them.  I need constant stimulation or Ill start to tab out and lose interest.  I saw that one of our rogues had been benched or was sitting out, so I asked if he could take my place.  I wasnt mad or upset.  I just wanted something to do and I wasnt finding that in my raid.  I knew that they would be fine without me and that they would have more than enough healing to get them through what they wanted to accomplish for the night. When I logged on this morning, I found that I had been demoted to a casual status in the guild.  I cant say that I was surprised or terribly upset about it.  But, it did get me thinking again about healer flexibility in the games that I enjoy.Im sure I could have offered to go DPS and I would have been entertained enough where I wouldnt have felt the need to leave and find something else to keep me occupied.  I didnt have to sit out for a DPS, when I could have just re-specced and performed that role myself.  I had opened myself up to being a better healer by learning how to heal in various ways.  But now, I feel like I have to take that one step further and be a better cleric or priest, in general.  Its not enough to just be a healer.  I have to be a tank and a DPS, too? The number of healers required in Firelands seemed to bounce back and forth.  This seems to be the case in Rift, too.  I was open to being a Purifier in Rift.  I am now open to the idea of being discipline in World of Warcraft.  Why dont I feel like thats enough?  Why do I feel like healers are being asked to be something theyre not, in order to get a raid spot?  What happened to the days when we were asked to heal and do nothing but heal?  Am I the only who feels this way?  Mind you, nobody has ever asked me to perform any of these roles.  But, if you only need so many healers to get past an encounter and you have more healers than are necessary, what else are they supposed to? Im a healer.  I love to heal.  I love seeing 20 health bars falling dangerously low and knowing that I have to pick them back up again.  I get a rush from seeing a tanks health bar bounce back and forth, from full to half-full to really low.  It gives me purpose and it gives me something to do.  I know that if Im not there, those health bars may not fill up as fast.  It gives me a reason to log on, to sign up for a raid.  Thats how passionate I am about what I do.When you have mages who can heal and do damage, plus clerics who can DPS while healing, and both seem to provide more utility and healing than a healing cleric can, whats the point of even showing up?  To me, there isnt one.  I feel that the original intent of make healing more inclusive by allowing more people to be able to heal is doing more excluding than anything else.  There are only so many spots to go around and far too many healers to fill them all up with.

All that and a bag of Baked Lays, its Episode Eight of the Double O Podcast!http://thedoubleopodcast.wordpress.com/2011/09/02/episode-8-parental-guidance-strongly-suggested/We packed this unbelievable episode with four, count them FOUR guests, Ceraphus, Christine, Fannon, & Hydra, all of whom are parents that you may or may not know from the blogosphere or the community at large.  They took time out of their day to join us on the show and discuss what its really like to be a parent who raids and juggles other responsibilities at the same time.Nothing was off limits here.  We talk about how to negotiate playing time with your significant other, dealing with your identity as a parent in the game, the perks of being in a family friendly guild, and whether or not they would want their children picking up a game like World of Warcraft in the not so distant future.Ophelie and I also include a big announcement about some future shows that we have coming up very soon.In other news, Ophelie and I were asked to make a guest appearance on a recent episode of the Stopcast this week.  The episode, called Double Ohhhh can be found here:http://www.stopcast.net/?p=episode&name=2011-09-06_episode58.mp3We got pretty rowdy with these guys and had a great time talking about ourselves, our friendship, what were both up to in our respective games, how the Double O Podcast got started, and a number of other salacious things that cant really be explained here.If youre in the mood for a few laughs and a slew of dirty talk, then check out that episode and have some laughs along with us.Thanks for stopping by!