Firstly, Happy New Year! I hope you had a good holiday season. I have been playing SWTOR, after something of a struggle to get my videocard drivers to stay installed correctly. Warcraft is also installed, but it feels like I’m still a tad burned out with that game. The next target to download is Rift, and then LOTRO to complete my MMO stable. Although when I will get time to play them all, I have no idea. Pewter has moved from the world of Apple to the world of Windows 7, and wow has it changed since I last...
That sickening feeling
I’m not feeling particularly eloquent right now. I’ll keep this short and simple. A well known british blogger was raped while on holiday, and is currently recovering in hospital. The incident was violent enough that it made the news. My thoughts go out to Alyzande. Anything I say towards this is going to be rather trite, so I’m not going to say anymore. I would...
Blizzcon: A much better apology
I said yesterday that my next post would be about happy things, such as Pandas or Monks. It IS a happy post. As an update to yesterday’s post, it seems something has finally filtered though. I appreciate the apology, it’s worlds apart from what I actually expected to get from Blizzard at this stage. Thank you Mike Morhaime, I will be optimistic and hope that this is a sign...
Blizzcon: This is about homophobia not Horde v Alliance
Since posting the below, Mike Morhaime has released this apology. I has a happy and am closing the comments on this post. If you would like to add to this discussion, please comment to the new apology post. I had a fantastic time at Blizzcon. I love the company and the games it puts out. I will likely...
A wild Obscurecast appears
Yes, I have been very quiet this year – despite predicting that I would be a very active poster in the summer. Oops. However I have re-discovered my enthusiasm for games and gaming in general again, and even went along to the Eurogamer Expo in London this year. As a result Obscurecast is back, with a brand new third...
[Patch 4.3] Maybe I won’t spec into Reverb
So, in case you hadn’t noticed the final Tier for Cataclysm is now on the PTR. This expansion really seems to have flown by, partly because I’ve stepped out of the game for the latter half. As a keen shaman fan who has long been disappointed in blue posts about my class, I must admit the changes for 4.3...
Meaningful travel time – passengers and drivers
I was reading this post by Syncaine on travel time in MMOs. And it got me musing a little bit. In real life (or meatspace) there are no instant teleports. You either get to drive, in which case you are occupied with the task of steering, or you are a passenger. In the case of the passenger you are...
Basement-dweller
This is a rather rambly post, not a polemic. Classism. It’s a word with a long history, but something I read in a WoW community elsewhere kind of gave me a little light bulb moment. If you want to put someone down in WoW, do it based on their actions and behaviour, not on guesses about their living situations....
Bioware: Romances in DA2 are for everyone
It’s not often a gaming company responds to criticism in such an awesome and heartwarming way. For every ‘embrace your inner-geek’ speech la Metzen there is a casual dismissal of concerns (again, a’la Metzen.) For Blizzard to remove Real ID from the forums took the impassioned responses of thousands upon thousands of users, for example. Their track record is...
Distinctiveness: When is an MMO not a book?
Hot off the heels of my first impressions of RIFT, I now want to touch on another broad MMO topic. In my last post I compared Warcraft and RIFT to two similar but rather different books by Terry Pratchett. However, this post at Massively touches on the long-standing criticisms of WoW and it’s influence on the MMO industry at...
RIFT: First impressions of Telara
I doubt this will become a RIFT blog, but one never knows. In any case, I finally picked up the RIFT beta over the last weekend and gave it a go. In the past I’ve tried Warhammer, EVE Online and had a brief stint in LOTRO, but none of them ever clicked and I was never able to put...
A content patch is not a mini-expansion
Excuse me, but I feel like being a little blunt. The general malaise that has infected twitter and some of the blogosphere about ‘recycled content’ is getting to new levels of irritating. Larisa posted a piece that neatly encapsulates this reaction to the news that ZA and ZG will be included in 4.1, and I guess it tipped me...
Up close and personal with Feludius
Oh sweet pickled onions. Interrupts. Not only that, but interrupting when I’ve not had any sleep. My guild is currently working on 25-man Twilight Ascendent Council in Bastion of Twilight and I was assigned to interrupt Hydro Lance in Phase 1, and so I did to the utter detriment of my DPS and my capacity to assess how the...
DPS trinkets for elemental shaman
You might have noticed that my latest post at WoW Insider was a quick run down of the hows and whys of choosing a trinket, followed by a quick run down of the better trinkets available at each level of play. In it I mentioned a spreadsheet that I’d used to calculate how good certain trinkets are in comparison to each...
Putting real life before gaming – YMMV
This isn’t a quitting post, nor is it going to be a long post about why my posting levels are much lower than they previously have been. Knowing my yearly energy cycle, you can expect me to be most active from around March until September, as that is when I tend to have the most creative energy to spend...
Plans and regrets
There is a lot going on in my head and in my life at the moment. One of my worries since becoming a blogger has been being able to back up my assertions and research with some real experience. Self confidence really helps when you’re supposed to be someone worth listening to. Unfortunately I tend to waver between having...
[Guest Post] Switching Sides – from Mage to Shaman
Thank goodness for the kindness of friends. I’ve been stretched very thin recently, what with one thing and another. My good friend Gazimoff, co-host of the Obscurecast, founder of the Mage Forums and blogger, offered to write about his experiences of trying out a shaman character from a mage’s perspective. Huzzah guest post! – Pewter I’ll let you into...
A new dwarf rambles
I lasted all of two hours before ‘Caenerys the Draenei‘ became ‘Caenerys the Dwarf‘. A grey-haired woman with a knowing expression, and no damn pigtails. I get that they’re awesome, but my dwarf wouldn’t risk getting her hair caught while out adventuring. Messy bun it is! An Aerie Peak native, caught on Draenor as part of the Wildhammer group...
World of Warcraft Fanart Profiles: Troll women
This is part of an ongoing series that reviews and attempts to deconstruct common tropes in the Blizzard Fanart Gallery. This is not a critique of the choices of individual artists, but a look at the choices Blizzard and those artists have made. For reasons of time/expendiency I am limiting this series to what is currently in the Blizzard Fan...
I’m all lost in the supermarket
This is a personal post, and somewhat rambly. This blog will return to elemental shaman stuff shortly. If you’re wondering where I’ve been, I’ve been co-hosting the Obscurecast along with Gazimoff of Mana Obscura and I left my authenticator at his house after the great Blizzcon weekend podcast-a-thon. I’ve also been extremely busy with my day job, and with...
Elemental PvP happens, rotation sims, and T11 is blah
That headline pretty much says it all. They hotfixed shaman T10 so that the Elemental Mastery cooldown reduction is now 1sec instead of 2sec. This is an expected nerf, and might explain why our dps dipped a little bit overnight, but it wasn’t in the patch notes so you might not have noticed it. It’s also worth watching out...
[Guest Post] 4.0.1: I logged on. Then I sat there and gawped at stats for an hour and a half.
![[Guest Post] 4.0.1: I logged on. Then I sat there and gawped at stats for an hour and a half.](http://mentalshaman.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/wraithstrike.jpg)
Greetings, ‘Mental Shaman readers! I’m Catulla, a guildmate of Pewter’s who enjoys dealing antlered, feathery-flavoured hurt to the baddies of Azeroth. Since Pewter’s been exploring the PTR and the beta for weeks, and I’ve been playing exclusively on the live realms, she’s asked me to write a “4.0.1 first impressions” post in her stead. I’ll obviously be coming at this...
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Latest Obscurecast Episodes
- The Obscurecast | Press Start to Continue: “All Change for Flaming Segues” (S4E1) January 22, 2012
- The Obscurecast: Sweater Or Cardigan? (S3E10) December 11, 2011
- The Obscurecast: Gaz Fail (S3E9) November 20, 2011
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