A Little Quiet Around Here

"I think writer's block is simply the dread that you are going to write something horrible. But as a writer, I believe that if you sit down at the keys long enough, sooner or later something will come out." - Roy Blount, Jr.

I have not abandoned my blog, but it's beginning to feel a little neglected these days. In the past couple of weeks I have been having a very hard time getting quality writing done. I have been struggling mightily with every post that I try to write, and so my blog has been very quiet as of late. The noise of the crickets around here is deafening.

With precious little time at home that isn't filled with satisfying the demands of either the Dwarfling or my Wife and free time at work diminishing as we enter our busy season, I am finding it increasingly hard to find the time or inspiration to sit down and write blog posts. And when I do try to bang out some words, I find myself harshly critiquing things before even getting anything written and so never manage to get very far. I'm probably over-thinking things and making it harder than it needs to be, but words just aren't coming to me easily right now.

It really bugs me that this Blog is as quiet as it is right now. I take a lot of pride in Battle Medic, and to see it wither - even temporarily - is painful to me. I think about it all the time. Not posting feels like a failure, which makes actually sitting down and working on new posts even harder because of the pressure that I'm putting on myself to get new and excellent content up. Filler posts like these are okay, I suppose, but I can't imagine listening to me whine about not posting is terribly compelling to anyone.


WHAT'S COMING

The worst part is that I have a lot of great posts that I want to get posted. Each one has a start, or a concept in my Drafts folder, but I am finding finishing them very difficult. As a result I have slipped quite dreadfully from my goal of three posts per week, and am barely managing one a week at the moment. I thought that in lieu of actually giving all you Battle Medic fans actual content, I would fill you folks in on what I'm currently working on.

• A Dungeoneering Shaman's Journey to 60
• The Druid Dilemma talking about why I don't have a druid even though I've always wanted one
• An article on my Power Auras for Holy Paladins & Resto Shamans
• Holy Paladin Basics guides
• an update on Raiding
• an article on the Recycling of content (ie, the Troll Dungeons)
• an article on the current state of WoW
• Serenity Saz's 15 Days of Screenshots Challenge with a unique Battle Medic flair. I'm actually quite excited about this and looking forward to doing it.

BATTLE MEDIC'S GREATEST HITS

I picked up lot of new readers and new subscribers in April while I was doing the 20 Days of WoW Challenge. With that in mind and seeing as how this is a filler post anyway, I thought that I would share with everyone a list of the posts from the earlier months of the blog that I am most proud of. This feels quite self-indulgent, but I hope that someone who hasn't gone through and read Battle Medic from the beginning finds something interesting.

The First Annual Peevie Awards

What Makes a Main?

Blogservations: Random Thoughts on Writing and Warcraft

On Archaeology and the Trials of Surveying

On Heroics: When is the Nerf Bat Necessary?

Pushing a Boulder Uphill

Favourite Weapon

Professing on Professions

REAL CONTENT COMING SOON

I promise.

  

  

Day Eleven: Faults, Flaws and Bad Habits (Part One of Six)

This post is part of a series "20 Days of... WoW Blogging Challenge", a blogging challenge suggested by Saga at Spellbound. She proposes twenty questions to be answered in twenty days and I, foolishly, have decided to take up this most daunting task because clearly my schedule is not full enough.

DAY ELEVEN: FAULTS, FLAWS AND BAD HABITS (Part One of Six)

Well, for starters the fact that I am writing this post at work while I am supposed to be being productive is one obviously bad habit.

This day of the challenge is one that I’m not really looking forward to writing. I mean, who really ever likes to take a good, hard, honest look at their own flaws and bad habits? Personally, I like to shove them into a dark hole with a thousand, rabid murlocs and pretend that they don’t exist. Denial is a very comfortable place to live as long as you keep the lighting levels low.

Interestingly, Kurn wrote up her Day Eleven post and as I read it, I realized I could just cut and paste it here and it would have been remarkably accurate. We share, it seems, a lot of the same issues.

Procrastination: I’m an absolute expert at leaving things until the last possible moment. And it really doesn’t matter what the task is or whether I am excited to do it or not – things with me get done just before they need to be done and not before. It’s a major flaw with me (and it drives my wife bonkers).

Follow Through: Quite often I will start a project with high, professional level expectations and then not follow it through to its end. Things will start brilliantly and then slowly begin to fizzle, until I eventually give up and move on to something else. This blog is a lovely counter-example, but I can think of a dozen others; the most egregious of which is my attempt to teach myself guitar (I haven’t picked up the instrument for 6 months or so after spending a couple hundred bucks on the guitar and Guitar for Dummies).

Lack of Focus: The skanky twin sister of the previous flaw, I am quite often distracted from a project with the shiny allure of a new, different project. Of all of my flaws this one… ooo, hey… I wonder what twitter is saying right now…

What? Oh, right.  Umm, of all my flaws this one bothers me the most. I want to be an expert at everything, but since I can’t focus on anything for long enough, it’s impossible to master the things that I am trying to learn.

Lazy: I had a huge, long write up on this planned, but meh, seems like too much work. I think I’ll go have a nap.

Regarding the game, I have many bad habits as well.

Cooldowns: I am terrible at using my cooldowns. There are a large number of fights that I have forgotten to use any cooldown at all. I’m making a concerted effort to get much better at this, and during our kill of Cho’gall last week I managed to be very good at using all of my tools at the appropriate time, but overall I suck at using them. I’m worse with my Priest, too.

Interface: If I were to look at my game, the one thing that could stand improvement is my interface. As of right now I have a usable UI, but it’s hardly optimal. Grid is probably doing too much, my Stuf Unit Frames are probably doing too little, I’m not even sure why I have Omen installed since it’s in a location I never look at, and DBM spews stuff all over my screen like a hung-over sorority chick.

I’m not a fan of having a million different add-ons installed, but I think that I need to do a bit more optimizing.

Fear: Even now, after having raided and instanced as much as I have and having played this game for almost three years, I am still intimidated by this game at times. For instance, I don’t know the classic dungeons very well, and so quite often I’ll worry about whether or not I’m ready for them. I am proved wrong every time that I end up doing one, but the fear that I don’t know enough – not ready – can be paralyzing.

Geez, that’s enough for now.  It’s getting uncomfortably bright in here and the murlocs are getting restless.

Tune in next time for Part Two of my Flaws: Glaring Sexual Deficiencies.*

Yesterday, DAY TEN: BLOG AND WEBSITE FAVOURITES

Tomorrow, DAY TWELVE: A DAY IN THE LIFE

* Note, this will not actually ever be published. It’s trapped in the dark with the murlocs forever.

   

  

Day Ten: Blog and Website Favourites

This post is part of a series "20 Days of... WoW Blogging Challenge", a blogging challenge suggested by Saga at Spellbound. She proposes twenty questions to be answered in twenty days and I, foolishly, have decided to take up this most daunting task because clearly my schedule is not full enough.

DAY TEN: BLOG AND WEBSITE FAVOURITES

If there is one thing that I have learned after getting plugged into Twitter, it's that there are far too many WoW blogs and resources to ever keep up with. Everyday it seems that I run across another new or new-to-me blog that is exceptional and worthy of being in my feed reader and my blogroll. It's impossible to keep up with all the excellent writing out there, and every morning when I open up Google Reader I am a little daunted at the sheer number of posts to get to.

There are, however, several blogs out there that I make sure to read whenever there is a new post. These are my essential blogs, most of which I have been reading well before I started blogging myself. All of these blogs are linked on my blogroll, of course.

Bossy Pally and the Giant Spoon by Ophelie

Kurn's Corner by Kurn

Blessing of Kings by Rohan

Muradin Musings by Janyaa
Revive & Rejuvenate by Angelya

(Un)holy Randomness by Endyme

There are more, of course, but those are the ones that I go out of my way to read as soon as something new shows up.

My blogroll is quite small at the moment, but I plan to do an overhaul very soon and expand it greatly.

Wowpedia, Wowhead, Tankspot and Youtube are all essential resources when you need to find out some factual information on the game, of course, and I use them all as often as needed. When I need to dig into the nuts and bolts of a class or spec, it's off to Elitist Jerks and the PlusHeal forums. And I spend more than a little time everyday reading WoW Insider WoW.com WoW Insider by Joystiq or whatever the hell they're called these days.  One day I will be linked by them, oh yes... one day.

And last but not least, I check my guild forums frequently throughout the day to see if anything is going on.

Yesterday, DAY NINE: THE FIRST BATTLE MEDIC POST
Tomorrow, DAY ELEVEN: BAD HABITS AND FLAWS (Part One of Six)

Day Eight: Ten Things About the Battle Medic

This post is part of a series "20 Days of... WoW Blogging Challenge", a blogging challenge suggested by Saga at Spellbound. She proposes twenty questions to be answered in twenty days and I, foolishly, have decided to take up this most daunting task because clearly my schedule is not full enough.


DAY EIGHT:  TEN THINGS ABOUT THE BATTLE MEDIC

1.  I'm 36 years old and live in Edmonton, Alberta with my wife Jenn, two beagles named Milo and Sisko and, of course, the darling little dwarfling, Teagan. I've been here for almost six years and moved from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Like all Saskatchewan ex-pats, I am curiously and fiercely fond of where I come from.

2.  I am a moderately large sports fan with a twist. I don't follow a sport, I follow a team. I follow and cheer for the Saskachewan Roughriders of the CFL, and try to go to the two games per year that they play here in Edmonton. Other than the Riders, however, I have no interest in the CFL whatsoever. Same thing for baseball - I was a mammoth Montreal Expos fan. I actually took my future wife to Montreal to see 8 games in 10 days in the spring of 2000, which was a blast.  She doesn't have any interest in baseball so to make the trip memorable for her I proposed to her at the top of the Olympic Stadium tower.  When the Expos moved to Florida Washington I lost all interest in baseball.

3.  In the winter I Curl to keep fit. I have been curling for a long time - about 25 years now. The problem with curling as a fitness activity is the bar that is attached to the rink. Beer, oddly enough, is not a health food drink.

4.  My very first computer was an Apple ][e with an incredible (for the time) 128KB of RAM, a Green monochrome montior and two 5.25 inch floppy drives. I grew up on this thing and I still think back fondly on all the games that I had for it. I have played around with emulators, but it's just not the same as the real thing.

5.  I have what can only be described as an insane amount of computers in my house. As of this particular moment I have 5 computers running and 3 more sitting idle, just waiting for a purpose. My wife thinks I need to seek professional counselling for this.

6.  I am very proud of my touch-typing skills. I have been typing for about 25 years. My mother was a secretary and could type something like 100 words per minute on an actual typewriter, which always impressed the hell out of me.  I learned how to type with an antique, manual typewriter which, once I got even remotely fast became frustrating very quickly as I began to jam the keys.

My own typing skills are pretty good, although occasionally suffer from disuse. I don't know how many words I can type per minute (I haven't tested myself in a long time), but my accuracy is pretty good when I'm using a keyboard that I'm used to. Interestingly, although I seldom use my laptop, I find it's keyboard the best typing keyboard I've ever used. Go figure.

The hardest thing that I have yet to master when it comes to typing is to slow down my brain enough so that my fingers can keep up.

I am trying to break myself of the habit of putting two spaces after a period, which in the era of proportionally spaced fonts is no longer necessary. Because I learned how to type in the age of typewriters, it was ingrained in me to double-space at the end of a sentence and has become a completely subconscious habit. Wow, is this ever a hard habit to get out of. If you look back at the last 10 articles or so on this blog you will see a crazy mish-mash of single and double spaces at the end of my sentences as I struggle with Double-Space Addiction.

7.  In many ways I am a perfectionist. Whenever I try to learn something new, I always reach to do it at a professional level. Whether it's designing a website, taking a photo, playing chess or the guitar, or writing a blog - I always want to take it to a very high degree professional quality or competence.

A really telling example is this 20 Days of... Challenge. There is no reason for me to have tried to actually do it in twenty consecutive days - heck, even Saga isn't actually doing one of these posts every day.  However, I feel compelled to push myself.  I was doing pretty good until this post, which is one day late.

In many ways, however, I am an utter failure at being a perfectionist because it's really an impossible standard to hold yourself to.  It's impossible to be an expert at everything.  I'll talk more about this on Day 11.

8.  I am a Wine and Whisky aficionado. I love a great wine and I absolutely go weak-kneed for a fine Single Malt Scotch whisky. I've been drinking wine for a long time, but was really educated when I met Andrew - a Scotsman friend of mine with an amazing palate for liquor. He taught me how to really taste the differences, and how to analyse and express what I was tasting.

Since then, I have tried to become an expert. I left the car industry for a job as a wine sales rep a few years ago and I have hosted dozens of whisky tastings. Needless to say, I've spent more than a few mornings feeling like Magmaw after a 25-man raid had their way with me the night before.

9.  I have been in the car industry for about six years now, not including the year that I spent selling wine. I sell Jaguars and Land Rovers. Contrary to popular opinion it is possible to be a car salesman without being a complete scumbag.

10.  My personality is an odd mix of introverted, quiet loner and exuberant, outgoing life-of-the-party guy. It all depends on my mood. I am completely and utterly dedicated to my wife, but can be an absolutely outrageous flirt at times. Yay, contradictory personality traits!


Yesterday, WHY THIS IS DWARVEN BATTLE MEDIC
Tomorrow, THE FIRST BATTLE MEDIC POST

On Magmaw and Pre-Raid Jitters

As I mentioned in my last post, Shadowgarde took on Magmaw in our first official guild raid.  We spent a solid hour and a half working on him over 7 or 8 attempts, but we finally got him down.  It was quite the thrilling finish as well:  Our tank died at 13% to a Mangle so we had to either kill Magmaw while he was chained, or else it would more than likely be a wipe.  Everyone stepped up the DPS, and even the healers started throwing all they had at the boss.  Magmaw died just at the last instant and we had our kill.

We did a single tank strategy on this fight, which put the pressure squarely on the healers to keep the tank alive.  Our healing team was myself, another Paladin and a Holy Priest.  For the most part, we were able to keep the team alive long enough to hit the enrage timer.  The strategy also called for the healers to stack with the Melee, which kept it much simpler and really allowed us to focus on the job of healing, and not dodging Pillars of Flame and those awful Lava Maggots.

I took my own advice and had a guildie craft the Elementium Stormshield for me before the raid began.  It felt very good to be fighting with a shield again, as opposed to a book.  I'm not sure how much of a difference it made, but it certainly gave me a tiny bit more confidence having a shiny purple equipped.

All in all, my pre-raid jitters were completely unfounded.  I think I did just fine. 

LESSONS

After the raid I took a look back at Recount to go through the numbers and analyze how I did and found a few things:

- I learned that you need to save your log quicker if you want to upload it to World of Logs.  Oops.

- Either Recount doesn't handle our Illuminated Healing Mastery properly (which is likely), or our mastery is completely and utterly broken.  According to Recount, in a 9 minute fight I had one single solitary shield that absorbed 2121 damage.  That simply cannot be right.  I wonder if I need to get an upgraded version.

- I gained back a total of 244000 mana.  Mainly from Seal of Insight as you’d expect, but I also got from Divine Plea, Glyph of Divinity, Corrupted Egg Shell and a Mana Potion.  Being able to recognize the slow damage period (which is fairly obvious in this fight) so you can slow your heals, hit Divine Plea and regenerate your mana is very key.  I managed to hit Divine Plea three times in that fight and my Corrupted Egg Shell at least twice.  Due to the healing reduction, I am reluctant to hit Divine Plea as often as I’d like, but I certainly can get better with using the Egg for mana regen.  It's a two minute cooldown, and I could have used it at least twice more.

The Innervate from the Druid and the Divine Hymn helped as well, of course.  Mana was my foremost concern for the entire fight, but I ended up managing it pretty well, I thought.  Blizzard wanted to make it matter, and they certainly have suceeded.

- Right now I do not have Lay on Hands glyphed to reduce the cooldown.  However, if Raid Boss fights are going to last this long, I'm definitely going to change that.  I could have used it twice in that fight, and it would have been extraordinarily useful a second time around.

- When you have a mechanic that requires everyone to bunch up, Holy Radiance is godly.  It ended up being my #2 heal after Beacon of Light.  I only remember popping it 5 or 6 times, but it ended up accounting for 16% of my overall healing.  Also, the Speed of Light boost saved my bacon in this fight three or four times when I was required to get out of the fire. 

- 53 Holy Shocks in a 9 minute fight seems a bit low.  Ideally, you could squeeze in 90, plus whatever Daybreak procs you get.  I need to improve on this.

- 21 Flash Heals and 9 Divine Lights.  I'm actually surprised that I managed to do with that few Divine Lights. 

- Only 16 Judgements.  Wow, it really felt like more.  If I was Judging on cooldown, I could have done 67, returning more than 150000 mana.  That’s a lot of mana left on the table and while you can't expect to perfectly judge every time it's available, I can definitely do better than this.

CONCLUSIONS

It is hard to draw any real conclusions from a single raiding night, but I think that I can say two things:  my healing style is not yet as efficient as I would like it to be, but I am ready to raid.

Bring on the bosses.

The First Annual Peevie Awards

This is a Blog Azeroth Shared Topic as suggested by Amaranth of Specced for Drama

Hello, and welcome to the 2010 Azeroth Peevie Awards, where we recognize excellence in the art of irritation and annoyance!  Your host for this year is, as always, the single most annoying character in all of Azeroth and the Outlands, CORKI!

[pause]

Wait, I’m sorry, I’m told that he’s been kidnapped again; this time by a hostile coalition of squirrels from Elwynn Forest.  Oh well, we now present the 2010 Peevie Awards after the jump!

Cataclys-meme response

Janyaa over at Muradin Musings posted a list of questions asking about initial impressions of Cataclysm which incidentally coincides with Blog Azeroth's current Shared Topic.  Since this blog is very new, and I'm not above cheap and easy content, here are my answers.

1. Disk or Download?
Disk. I bought the Collectors Edition on Tuesday in the late morning. More for the L’il Deathwing pet than anything. I was a little worried that I would have a tough time finding one, but my local Future Shop had stacks of them.

2. Did you experience any difficulties? IE: Login servers crashing, late delivery, etc?
No problems at all when I installed it. There was no queue on Tuesday afternoon when I logged in for the first time. I did run into a nasty bug that made the boat from Stormwind Harbour to Darnassus disappear, tho.

3. What are you doing first? IE: Speed leveling to 85, rolling a new race, completely avoiding the new content, etc?
Leveling to 85. It’s now official, my Paladin is my main. I didn’t even give my priest a second glance before beginning to level the Pally.

4. Mt. Hyjal or Vash'jir?
Hyjal. I actually meant to do Vashj’ir first, but my brain got mixed up and I ended up going through the Hyjal portal instead. By that time it was “Meh… I’m here already”.

5. Worgen or Goblin?
Both, eventually. I created the Worgen druid that I’ve been itching to create since I heard that there was another druid option other than Night Elves (eeewwwwww). The Worgen don’t look as cool as I was hoping for. I created a goblin on a different server and they look awesome! Finding a great name for a gobbo was a lot harder than I thought, tho.

6. Questing, dungeons or both?
Both, of course. With 100k xp for just doing your daily random Cataclysm dungeon, why wouldn’t you? I’ve already got some great gear out of Blackrock Caverns, and the dungeons are not nearly as hard as everyone was saying in Beta (50 Whacks with a Wet Nerf Bat). As of this writing, I am just about to ding 82 and most of the way through Hyjal. The only problem I’ve found with dungeons is being required to find the Entrance before you can queue for it in the Dungeon Finder. I love that idea in theory, but it’s annoying in practice.

7. What was the first piece of gear you replaced and with what?
My retribution set is being completely dismantled now. One of the very first quests gave me a new 2-handed green sword to replace my Tyrannical Beheader axe from the ICC 5 mans. As of now, I’m in about ½ quest greens/dungeon blues. My holy gear hasn't really been touched yet, however. I think I have only a new trinket from BRC and maybe one green upgrade.

8. Did you take any time off from work or school?
No, sadly. I had Tuesday off, but that’s it.

9. Will you be keeping the same spec and main, or changing to a different toon?
I changed my main halfway through Icecrown Citadel, so I think I’m good for now.

10. What's been your favorite aspect of Cataclysm so far?
New content is new! (I just lost the game, btw). Also, this is the first expansion that I’ve been max level for and it’s been interesting to see the mayhem that is the leveling zones. It’s amazing seeing dozens upon dozens of people all doing the same quests. The gigantic pile of bones around Baron Geddon in Hyjal was seriously impressive to see.