A motel room is ripped from time and space. Everything that was inside it seems to have special properties. The pen will make you explode, the wrist watch can boil eggs, the glass eye can disintegrate flesh, the comb will stop time. And there are about 100 objects scattered throughout the world. Only the key can get you inside the room.
That is the plot of a really cool mini series called The Lost Room that I've just finished watching. You can see it either as three 1,5 hour episodes or six 45 minute episodes (I saw the 1,5 hour ones, they're original cut).
The series starts out with copper Joe Miller getting his hands on The Key. He has no idea what it does at first, but when trying it out he finds that it takes him to a motel room. From this motel room he can access any point on the planet that happens to have a door. Suddenly a bunch of people show up to steal his key and he gets more and more involved into something really weird with the Order and the Legion fighting eachother to gain power over as many objects as possible. Where did the room come from? What happens when you collect all the objects?
My mom, who loves science fiction, tipped me off about this series and it stuck with me at once. The idea and the build up of the story is very well performed and wanting to find out more and more about this twisted room will get you hooked asap. When seeing it I thought that the ending could only be bad since I only wanted to see more about it. In hindsight I do feel the series could've earned some hours more, but this length was ok and the story unfolds in a terrific pace, just enough to keep you interested all the way without blurting it all out in your face at once. I don't want to spoil the ending for you, but I can say that it is good enough. Not surprisingly, it's not completely an ending, but also not really a continuation. You really feel like it could either go on, or you could just let it go. You have to see it to understand I think ;)
So if you need something to watch for some rainy days, I definitely recommend this series!
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Rares and Blues
I probably shouldn't do this, but as with other things in life that one shouldn't do, I'm gonna go on and do it anyway!
I'm going to give you some tips on rare spawns in Vanilla that have high chances to drop blues and that could earn you some extra cash. All the rares in Outlands and Northrend drop blues, but only very few of the Vanilla ones do. And most of those blues are rather good and will therefore give you some 30-100g on AH. Here are my top three favorite rares in Vanilla.
1. Lo'Grosh
Lo'Grosh is an ogre inside one of the ogre caves in Alterac Mountains. He has a good chance to drop not only one, but two good blue items. Black Ogre Kickers, really nice level 32 mail boots with strength and stamina, and The Pacifier, an awesome level 32 mace (4.00 speed!) with tons of strength and some stamina. Both these items are worth more than 50g at AH. Lo'Grosh himself is level 39, so when you quest in these areas he should be around your level. He isn't elite either but hits rather hard and uses bloodlust which will make him hit even harder.
2. Skhowl
Yet another npc situated in Alterac Mountains. This is nice because you can just run to check if either is up any time you're in the vicinity. Skhowl is a yeti just behind the goblin Bro'kin that sells the Frost Oil recipe. Skhowl is the only black yeti among all the white yetis, so he can't really be missed. He drops a really nice level 31 dagger, Howling Blade, which one can get about 20-40g for depending on server. Skhowl is killed more often than Lo'grosh and therefore the prevalence of other Howling Blades on AH is usually greater than with other boe blues. Skhowl is level 36, also non-elite and really easily killed.
3. Ironeye the Invincible
Ironeye wanders the southern parts of Shimmering Flats, and really stands out in the white sand as he is an all dark greenish basilisk among all the white basilisks. Ironeye isn't easy at all, he is level 37 which is rather high for that area and also elite which makes him quite tough for anyone around that level to kill. He has a high chance to drop Blade of the Basilisk, a really cool level 32 sword which has a chance on hit to increase defense by 50 (!) for 5 seconds. At that level, 50 defense is tons, giving the wielder a big amount of dodge, parry and crit reduction for a short amount of time. Although it gives defense, this weapon is good for rogues and dps warrior as well and you could probably get more than 50g for it at AH. As with any vanilla weapon however, this probably has a low proc chance. The weapon has a really rare skin too which I might talk more about in another post.
Do you know of any other rares that drop good blues?
Good luck hunting!
I'm going to give you some tips on rare spawns in Vanilla that have high chances to drop blues and that could earn you some extra cash. All the rares in Outlands and Northrend drop blues, but only very few of the Vanilla ones do. And most of those blues are rather good and will therefore give you some 30-100g on AH. Here are my top three favorite rares in Vanilla.
1. Lo'Grosh
Lo'Grosh is an ogre inside one of the ogre caves in Alterac Mountains. He has a good chance to drop not only one, but two good blue items. Black Ogre Kickers, really nice level 32 mail boots with strength and stamina, and The Pacifier, an awesome level 32 mace (4.00 speed!) with tons of strength and some stamina. Both these items are worth more than 50g at AH. Lo'Grosh himself is level 39, so when you quest in these areas he should be around your level. He isn't elite either but hits rather hard and uses bloodlust which will make him hit even harder.
2. Skhowl
Yet another npc situated in Alterac Mountains. This is nice because you can just run to check if either is up any time you're in the vicinity. Skhowl is a yeti just behind the goblin Bro'kin that sells the Frost Oil recipe. Skhowl is the only black yeti among all the white yetis, so he can't really be missed. He drops a really nice level 31 dagger, Howling Blade, which one can get about 20-40g for depending on server. Skhowl is killed more often than Lo'grosh and therefore the prevalence of other Howling Blades on AH is usually greater than with other boe blues. Skhowl is level 36, also non-elite and really easily killed.
3. Ironeye the Invincible
Ironeye wanders the southern parts of Shimmering Flats, and really stands out in the white sand as he is an all dark greenish basilisk among all the white basilisks. Ironeye isn't easy at all, he is level 37 which is rather high for that area and also elite which makes him quite tough for anyone around that level to kill. He has a high chance to drop Blade of the Basilisk, a really cool level 32 sword which has a chance on hit to increase defense by 50 (!) for 5 seconds. At that level, 50 defense is tons, giving the wielder a big amount of dodge, parry and crit reduction for a short amount of time. Although it gives defense, this weapon is good for rogues and dps warrior as well and you could probably get more than 50g for it at AH. As with any vanilla weapon however, this probably has a low proc chance. The weapon has a really rare skin too which I might talk more about in another post.
Do you know of any other rares that drop good blues?
Good luck hunting!
Monday, July 26, 2010
A-o-R: AuctionLite
AuctionLite
Category - AH mod
Necessity Level - Medium
Class/Role - Any
This time we'll look at an addon that took me quite some time to get, but once I tried it I immedatiely fell in love.
When leveling a bunch of alts, you'll get alot of junk. Selling this junk will usually get you alot of money, but it also takes alot of time taking care of. Seeing to it that your items get properly priced according to the current market means researching what else is on the AH. My solution to this was to do a simple search for the item I was going to sell, and then manually underprice it with some silver. Easy enough, but when you've got 50 items in your bags to sell, this quickly takes quite a while.So I complained about it to Love and he told me about getting an auction addon. I said I didn't want something bulky that needed to be updated through continuous scans and whatnot, just something that did what I did, but automagically - search for current prices on AH and undercut.
And lucky me, there was just such an addon. Enter AuctionLite!
AuctionLite will do exactly this. When you go to AH it gives you two new tabs. AuctionLiteSell and AuctionLiteBuy. Meaning it won't remove the original AH view in case you want to use them.
AuctionLiteSell will scan the AH for the item you have added (using alt + rightclick) and automatically undercut it by an amount set by you (there is a default amount set that works just fine). If there is no other item like yours on AH, it will automatically set the price to 3 times vendor price. For stuff like gear this works well, but for stuff like consumables (meat, ores etc) this is totally off, since an ore might be worth 1 silver to vendor but way more than 3 silver on AH. This just means you will have to tell it what price you want for these items, and it will use that price the next time this happens.
AuctionLiteSell uses an average of the items on AH to set its price. In case someone has a really really low price, it won't try to undercut that, but rather the prices it sees as within the "normal" price range for the item.
On the picture we can see the grey items representing items that are too cheap to undercut, the yellow items represent my own auctions and the white auctions represent auctions of others that are undercuttable.
AuctionLiteBuy will give you a new "buy items"- interface. This allows you to do something Blizzard should've implemented long ago - buying stuff in bulks. Some people (idiots *cough*) place items like cloth and dusts in single stacks, thus cramming AH with pages up and down of these items. Buying them one and one takes forever as well (and who the heck needs -one- cloth!?) but with AuctionLiteBuy you can select any number and press "buy". Before you do the mistake of your lifetime accidentally buying 100 Abyss Crystals, you'll get an "approve this buy" selection, telling you exactly how much the entire purchase will cost before actually buying anything.
The Buy Stuff Interface will also show you price per item and per stack among other things.
This is a set and forget kind of addon. Just simply download it, put into your addons-folder and it will work. Any time you have to do anything about it is if you want to fine tune it's pricing settings. I haven't done this as I am perfectly happy with default settings, so I can't really tell you how difficult that is. My guess is that it's easy though, like the rest of the addon.
I love the AuctionLiteSell part of this addon. It saves me tons of time, and if you have any regular business with AH at all, I really recommend using this. it does everything I want nearly automatically (I still have to place the items and collect the money). The AuctionLiteBuy part is good too, but not the main reason I use this addon. It's great for when I want to buy bulks, but otherwise I actually still prefer the original setup.
Category - AH mod
Necessity Level - Medium
Class/Role - Any
This time we'll look at an addon that took me quite some time to get, but once I tried it I immedatiely fell in love.
When leveling a bunch of alts, you'll get alot of junk. Selling this junk will usually get you alot of money, but it also takes alot of time taking care of. Seeing to it that your items get properly priced according to the current market means researching what else is on the AH. My solution to this was to do a simple search for the item I was going to sell, and then manually underprice it with some silver. Easy enough, but when you've got 50 items in your bags to sell, this quickly takes quite a while.So I complained about it to Love and he told me about getting an auction addon. I said I didn't want something bulky that needed to be updated through continuous scans and whatnot, just something that did what I did, but automagically - search for current prices on AH and undercut.
And lucky me, there was just such an addon. Enter AuctionLite!
AuctionLite will do exactly this. When you go to AH it gives you two new tabs. AuctionLiteSell and AuctionLiteBuy. Meaning it won't remove the original AH view in case you want to use them.AuctionLiteSell will scan the AH for the item you have added (using alt + rightclick) and automatically undercut it by an amount set by you (there is a default amount set that works just fine). If there is no other item like yours on AH, it will automatically set the price to 3 times vendor price. For stuff like gear this works well, but for stuff like consumables (meat, ores etc) this is totally off, since an ore might be worth 1 silver to vendor but way more than 3 silver on AH. This just means you will have to tell it what price you want for these items, and it will use that price the next time this happens.
AuctionLiteSell uses an average of the items on AH to set its price. In case someone has a really really low price, it won't try to undercut that, but rather the prices it sees as within the "normal" price range for the item.
On the picture we can see the grey items representing items that are too cheap to undercut, the yellow items represent my own auctions and the white auctions represent auctions of others that are undercuttable.
AuctionLiteBuy will give you a new "buy items"- interface. This allows you to do something Blizzard should've implemented long ago - buying stuff in bulks. Some people (idiots *cough*) place items like cloth and dusts in single stacks, thus cramming AH with pages up and down of these items. Buying them one and one takes forever as well (and who the heck needs -one- cloth!?) but with AuctionLiteBuy you can select any number and press "buy". Before you do the mistake of your lifetime accidentally buying 100 Abyss Crystals, you'll get an "approve this buy" selection, telling you exactly how much the entire purchase will cost before actually buying anything.
The Buy Stuff Interface will also show you price per item and per stack among other things.
This is a set and forget kind of addon. Just simply download it, put into your addons-folder and it will work. Any time you have to do anything about it is if you want to fine tune it's pricing settings. I haven't done this as I am perfectly happy with default settings, so I can't really tell you how difficult that is. My guess is that it's easy though, like the rest of the addon.
I love the AuctionLiteSell part of this addon. It saves me tons of time, and if you have any regular business with AH at all, I really recommend using this. it does everything I want nearly automatically (I still have to place the items and collect the money). The AuctionLiteBuy part is good too, but not the main reason I use this addon. It's great for when I want to buy bulks, but otherwise I actually still prefer the original setup.
Sunday, July 25, 2010
Know Your Meme
Since I have to get up at 7 am and work until monday, I don't have time to do a long post. Instead I'll give you a small tip to check out the Know Your Meme site.
I'm sure anyone has heard of Lolcats, Hitler Reacts or Over 9000 by now. Memes are a huge part of internet, whether we like them or not (and there are always some memes that are just hilarious). KYM tracks memes, tells you where they came from, shows examples and such so you can understand what the heck a meme is all about. It's perfect for when you're bored and it's marvellous really what people can make a meme off. Anything it seems. And most of them are good. So check it out!.
I'm sure anyone has heard of Lolcats, Hitler Reacts or Over 9000 by now. Memes are a huge part of internet, whether we like them or not (and there are always some memes that are just hilarious). KYM tracks memes, tells you where they came from, shows examples and such so you can understand what the heck a meme is all about. It's perfect for when you're bored and it's marvellous really what people can make a meme off. Anything it seems. And most of them are good. So check it out!.
Saturday, July 24, 2010
Analyzing 25LK Healing
I love to look at graphs. Well actually I hate graphs, but I love them when I am part of them and they show something that I understand and can relate to, like a 25man LK kill.
I joined a guildrun with Love and a friend of mine (not our guild though), and we burned through 25man ICC pretty easily. Considering the 30% buff, that isn't especially difficult anymore, but it is still interesting to see what was done and how. Or at least I think so. So let's look at the graph from that LK kill and see if we can draw some conclusions about the way healing was done and how it should be done.
Healing done
First off, healing done for the fight (not including non-healers). I was a disc priest and the other priest was holy. It shows how well disc works for this kind of fight. Alot of aoe damage everywhere and some nuke healing here and there. Shields are just lovely for that kind of damage and especially for this fight since it takes care of Infest.
This other graph might look cluttered at first. But it tells us alot of things. We've got two spikes (except for my last one before the "death". The first spike shows the two shamans and the druid basically doubling their healing output for a short period of time about 2 minutes into the fights. The spike is for about 30 seconds and I am guessing this might be about when the phase transition comes. The Lich King does alot of AoE then that the shaman/druid are raid healing up. Placing yourself close to the edge as a shaman/paladin might be wise since as you can see, the paladins healing drops instead, probably because he has to move.
Graph
I'm spiking just before that, which might be due to a infest going off on my shields. Just after the spike we all drop down low except for the holy priest that spikes. This might be us running back into the middle, and he uses some on the run healing like renew and CoH.
In the second phase we all heal about as much as the other except for one of the shamans dropping down low. The only reason I can see for that happening is him running around too much, not being able to find a good spot from where to heal.
Just before the second phase transition we see the same thing, the "mobile" healers spike up for the aoe healing (druid and priest) while the paladin drops really low because he's running out. This time we can also see that the one shaman has been able to get to the edge faster than the other and does more healing during the transition. My healing drops somewhat when the druid and other priest healing spikes, mostly probably because they take care of business (I'll explain what I mean about that shortly*).
Just at the beginning of phase three the other priests healing done drops to zero for 10 seconds. The only explanation I can see for this, since he didn't die, is that he was pulled into Frostmourne and lost from the tracker.
The blue bar represents bloodlust, and here we can see something interesting. The druid dies, but what happens with the paladin? Instead of increasing healing done during bloodlust, she dips significantly. It is also interesting to see that none of us healers spike during this. As a disc healer you don't benefit much from Bloodlust, but the shamans and paladins should. Instead, their healing is lower than ever. My guess here would be that the shamans are starting to oom. The paladin is probably stuck behind a defile and had to run most of the Bloodlust duration (this is only guessing though).
The first red stripe during Bloodlust is the death of one of the tanks. See how this coincides perfectly with the paladin heal drop? Not only the paladin, just before we can see the other priests drop and the druid is dwindling down too. The druid dies at the same time, and they both die of Spirit Bursts. These heal drops are surely the reason to why the tank dies (he got a combat res and we made it anyway fortunately).
The second stripe represents the resurrection of the tank (as I just mentioned), and we can see how the paladins healing spikes just after that. 1,5 min later, the paladin dies (Harvest Soul) and every healers healing is slowly going down except mine that spikes again, maybe as a counter act on the other healers healing dropping. 10 minutes into the fight we all die, whichh is part of the event, and the fight is basically over from there.
Now let's look at what heals were cast.
Heals used by me
Here we can see my top 6 healing spells. As expected by a disc priest, Shield, Aegis, and Glyph of Shield are way on the top. One might wonder why Penance and Flash Heal get as low as they do however. This is explained by the fact that disc priests are lousy sniper healers compared to other classes (or maybe that's just me). *With two shamans and a paladin in the raid we can see that my Flash Heals and Penance casts are mostly overheals. Prayer of Mending does its job nicely however, since it "procs" when damage is done to the target, which means it can never really be 100% overheal.
The uptime of Shield and Aegis should preferrably be as low as possible because the lower the uptime, the more likely that it was fully absorbed. About 70% of my healing is just absorbs through Shield and Aegis, and that is what disc priest is all about. Like I have said many times before, absorbtion offers a unique way of healing thorugh damage reduction, and it should really be used to the max. Don't waste mana on Penance and Flash Heals unless you deem it really necessary. Otherwise you must trust your fellow healers to do their job properly and get the sniper healing done.
In a fight like LK where there is aoe damage everywhere and you can expect anyone to take damage at any time basically, there is no reason not to keep shields up on people at all times and also to use a Prayer of Mending as often as you can.
I joined a guildrun with Love and a friend of mine (not our guild though), and we burned through 25man ICC pretty easily. Considering the 30% buff, that isn't especially difficult anymore, but it is still interesting to see what was done and how. Or at least I think so. So let's look at the graph from that LK kill and see if we can draw some conclusions about the way healing was done and how it should be done.
Healing doneFirst off, healing done for the fight (not including non-healers). I was a disc priest and the other priest was holy. It shows how well disc works for this kind of fight. Alot of aoe damage everywhere and some nuke healing here and there. Shields are just lovely for that kind of damage and especially for this fight since it takes care of Infest.
This other graph might look cluttered at first. But it tells us alot of things. We've got two spikes (except for my last one before the "death". The first spike shows the two shamans and the druid basically doubling their healing output for a short period of time about 2 minutes into the fights. The spike is for about 30 seconds and I am guessing this might be about when the phase transition comes. The Lich King does alot of AoE then that the shaman/druid are raid healing up. Placing yourself close to the edge as a shaman/paladin might be wise since as you can see, the paladins healing drops instead, probably because he has to move.
GraphI'm spiking just before that, which might be due to a infest going off on my shields. Just after the spike we all drop down low except for the holy priest that spikes. This might be us running back into the middle, and he uses some on the run healing like renew and CoH.
In the second phase we all heal about as much as the other except for one of the shamans dropping down low. The only reason I can see for that happening is him running around too much, not being able to find a good spot from where to heal.
Just before the second phase transition we see the same thing, the "mobile" healers spike up for the aoe healing (druid and priest) while the paladin drops really low because he's running out. This time we can also see that the one shaman has been able to get to the edge faster than the other and does more healing during the transition. My healing drops somewhat when the druid and other priest healing spikes, mostly probably because they take care of business (I'll explain what I mean about that shortly*).
Just at the beginning of phase three the other priests healing done drops to zero for 10 seconds. The only explanation I can see for this, since he didn't die, is that he was pulled into Frostmourne and lost from the tracker.
The blue bar represents bloodlust, and here we can see something interesting. The druid dies, but what happens with the paladin? Instead of increasing healing done during bloodlust, she dips significantly. It is also interesting to see that none of us healers spike during this. As a disc healer you don't benefit much from Bloodlust, but the shamans and paladins should. Instead, their healing is lower than ever. My guess here would be that the shamans are starting to oom. The paladin is probably stuck behind a defile and had to run most of the Bloodlust duration (this is only guessing though).
The first red stripe during Bloodlust is the death of one of the tanks. See how this coincides perfectly with the paladin heal drop? Not only the paladin, just before we can see the other priests drop and the druid is dwindling down too. The druid dies at the same time, and they both die of Spirit Bursts. These heal drops are surely the reason to why the tank dies (he got a combat res and we made it anyway fortunately).
The second stripe represents the resurrection of the tank (as I just mentioned), and we can see how the paladins healing spikes just after that. 1,5 min later, the paladin dies (Harvest Soul) and every healers healing is slowly going down except mine that spikes again, maybe as a counter act on the other healers healing dropping. 10 minutes into the fight we all die, whichh is part of the event, and the fight is basically over from there.
Now let's look at what heals were cast.
Heals used by meThe uptime of Shield and Aegis should preferrably be as low as possible because the lower the uptime, the more likely that it was fully absorbed. About 70% of my healing is just absorbs through Shield and Aegis, and that is what disc priest is all about. Like I have said many times before, absorbtion offers a unique way of healing thorugh damage reduction, and it should really be used to the max. Don't waste mana on Penance and Flash Heals unless you deem it really necessary. Otherwise you must trust your fellow healers to do their job properly and get the sniper healing done.
In a fight like LK where there is aoe damage everywhere and you can expect anyone to take damage at any time basically, there is no reason not to keep shields up on people at all times and also to use a Prayer of Mending as often as you can.
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