I need your help.

My Blogroll is pitiful. It’s based on the blogging community nearly a year ago, and doesn’t reflect the current warcraft blogging community at all.

I’ve tried to come up with ways to keep it trim and useful, and I’ve failed every time. I joined the Blog Azeroth forums, but I didn’t have the time needed to stick with it (even though it is an incredible community). I’ve tried following links for people who comment here and on other blogs, and I keep forgetting to save the link, or I slap it in my feed reader and forget to add it to my blogroll.

So, since you guys were so awesomely forthcoming in my “help, I need podcasts” post, I figure you know what you like to read. You are, in fact, experts in the WoW Blogosphere.

What I’m looking for

Any blog that spends at least 75% of its time being :

• Educational. I want blogs that help readers become better players. Resto4Life, for example.
• Entertaining. I want blogs that are not just well-written, but exceptionally well written. I don’t care how educational it is, as long as it’s fun. Need More Rage, for example. An RP story blog that is engaging, easy to follow, and keeps my attention is JUST as important to me as one that breaks down hunter shot rotations. If anything, I tend to like those more than the Educational blogs.
• Grammar. I’m not going to be a huge stickler on this one, but I’m going to be honest and say that any blog more than seasoned with leet speak and flagrant misspellings is unlikely to make the cut. I’m old-fashioned that way. Perhaps that means I miss out on excellent advice and helpful entries, but if my brain starts hemmoraging because I spent too long trying to decipher your crazy moon language, I doubt you’re going to pay my medical bills.

What I’m NOT looking for

Any blog that spends more than 75% of its time on the following topics :

• Loot that has dropped (without some kind of comparison and explanation of why it was an upgrade)
• What percentage they’ve managed to get X boss to during raiding this week (without some kind of discussion about tactics used)
• A blog that hasn’t been updated in the past month - and rarely before that.
• A blog that is less than one month old (sorry, but newer blogs are more likely to fold, and I don’t want to be pruning my blogroll. Generally, if it’s been a month, the blogger knows whether or not blogging is something they enjoy and will continue. If you’d like to recommend a blog that falls here anyway, make a note in your comment so that I know to go back and check it again later.)
• Non-Warcraft focus. (Individual non-warcraft posts are not only fine, they can be a nice change of pace. But if more than 75% of a blog is non-warcraft, regardless of how entertaining and fabulous it may be, I won’t add it to my blogroll. Otherwise TJ would have been linked a year ago.)

Size Matters

My blogroll will remain small. I’m not looking to beef up my SEO statistics by linking to every WoW blog ever written. I want to link to those blogs that I myself read, or will read. Being on the blogroll of my site is a personal recommendation for anyone who visits, and that’s the way I want to keep it.

I hate visiting a site and seeing a blogroll that would choke a rhino. How do I even know where to begin on those?! I’m lost before I even start.

How to Recommend

Just add a comment with a link or series of links. Some of you may get stuck in the spam filter on this one, I’ll be watching it and unsticking you as soon as I can.

If you feel like adding a one line blurb about the blog, feel free - but it’s not required.

I promise to visit every blog linked here, but I do not promise to blogroll them all. Don’t worry about whether or not your suggestion is “obvious” or whether or not I already have it on my blogroll, or even whether or not someone has already suggested it. A vote is a vote is a vote, and I take five mentions of “Banana Shoulders” to be five votes for that blog. You can bet I’m going to take a long look at the ones mentioned over and over again.

And if you don’t want to find the link but you know the name of the blog, I will attempt a google search to find it. You don’t even have to paste the link as long as you spell the blog name correctly and google knows how to find it.

Pimp your site! Pimp your friends’ sites! Go hog wild

I hate warlocks.

No really. Maybe I’m racist, or classist, or something. I just hate them.

Inevitably they’re stuffy and irritable, cranky and all around moody. They don’t have anything to offer a group except killing things faster, and even their pets are just kind of in the way. At least a rogue has practical abilities, and a hunter can do… stuff. I guess.

At least most hunters aren’t blatantly suicidal.

Alright alright, the caveat. Not ALL warlocks are useless suicidal emokids. The mistress of my own house is quite regal and intelligent and quite able to handle herself. But she’s moody too, so I guess there’s that.

But most of them are just terribad. We’re out there fighting fighting fighting, the rogue, mage, and warlock are arguing over the dps meter, and everything’s dead. Well before I sit down to drink, I’d like to pick up the stuff off the corpses. Y’know, it’s mine, I might as well. Then I sit down to drink, and the guy in a dress suddenly starts farting this green cloud that gets sucked back into him as mana. And his health is going down.

“heal plx”

I mean, seriously? You just did that to yourself! Bandage, you skuzzy booger. Make that half-dressed hoofed harlot heal you, she’s obviously bored enough to give herself spankies. I’d say you’re not giving her enough attention as it is. I don’t go and throw a bunch of heavy heals at the tank while he’s at full health, then turn to the mage and demand some water. She’s got other things to deal with. You! You should be using that rock candy stuff you make out of the souls of pigs and dwarves and things.

There! Problem solved. Lifetap, then healthstone! That way I can focus on keeping the rest of the group alive. The ones that are not over there crying about how no one understands their pain and slashing their wrists with ceremonial daggers or whatever.

“Nothing’s alright, nothing is fine!”

What? Look, if it’s that bad, I’m a priest. I know people that can y’know, fix you. You can be un-evilled! Enough with the sadface, and then crying when I don’t heal you through your own psychotic hellfire. Stealing agro from the tank AND incinerating your own flesh? You deserve to be cinders!

I wish my hair could be a warlock. Then it’d cut itself.

I guess I should ask you what class you specifically hate. And why. Or something. But I’m so depressed right now I can’t be bothered. /emosigh

I think you guys have noticed the Ego crew has kept fairly quiet about all of the massive upcoming changes to the game and everything that Wrath will bring. A little of that tight lipped’ness is due to not wanting to go over something that is so likely to change, while some is not wanting to see massive (possibly heated) debates on what will be good or what will suck.

However, as release time of both the 3.0x patch and the expac itself grows every closer, we’d like to hear what you are excited about. Be it talent changes, new spells, new pets (great and small), new graphics or new storylines, let us know!

Go all out or just write a quip, everyone chime in, I for one am curious as hell. I know what has me excited…whats your game? (c wut I did thar?)

By now, I’m sure most of you have at least had the opportunity to visit the Brewfest boss, Corin Direbrew.

Having healed him (and yes, died to him, even though I’m overgeared) there are a few little tips and tricks I can recommend.

• Don’t HoT. Leave your Heal over Time spells at home. It pains me to say it, but with the regular entrance of new adds, if you’ve got a HoT ticking on ANYONE, you’ll be grabbing aggro before your tank even realizes that you’ve got a mob on you.
• Drink the beer. That’s not really a healer-specific tip, but it’s important nonetheless. Keep your inventory open and drink the beer when it’s thrown to you.
• Frisbee like MAD. Without a HoT, Prayer of Mending is going to be your most useful “little heal”. With all those adds and the whirlwindy effect from the boss, it can save your groupmates.
• Binding Heal. Don’t forget this little gem. If you need a heal, it’s much lower aggro than your other possible heals to use IT instead of two flash heals.
• Patience. The aggro table of the dwarves that join the fight via the Mole Machines (or Mechanical Grabloids, if you prefer) starts AFTER the machine appears. Feel free to finish a heal when you see one appear, but don’t start a new one until the dwarf add makes it to the tank. (Unless your tank is dying, of course. This assumes you CAN wait.) Be patient, and let your tank get aggro before you start dropping massive heals and stealing adds from him.
• Bubble and Fade. If the tank gets a barrel on his head, you’re probably going to find yourself uncomfortably popular. Don’t forget to fade if you get an add, and bubble if fade’s on cooldown. Frisbees are also good in this situation.

Also, Blizz? If you nerfed the drop rate on the Brewfest mounts, you should realize by now that you’ve dropped it too far. We’ve run this thing more than thirty times in the last three days, and NOT ONE MOUNT HAS DROPPED.

Neither has the remote, for that matter.

Inconceivable!

The Twisted Nether is hosting another Shared Topic, and since I seem to keep missing out on joining in, here’s a special, extra-short Wednesday edition of Ego for your reading pleasure.

This week’s shared topic is Profession Additions, and since I’ve been having a lot of fun with that lately, I thought I’d share my secret profession addition desire with you.

Remember Talk Like a Pirate Day? When you could say hello to one of the little goblin commoners and POOF! you’re suddenly wearing a pirate costume, even though you didn’t have to equip a new set of clothes?

Glyphs. Inscription, give me a glyph, please, Lesser Glyph of Wardrobe.

As part of the materials, I put in actual gear - up to an entire set of visible gear. All of the stats disappear from the gear, but if I equip the glyph (or trinket, or whatever), my avatar appears to be wearing THOSE clothes, without me having to swap in and out of my adventuring gear.

Because the stats disappear, it pretty much destroys the old gear. The point is that I can look like I’m wearing a lovely dress instead of looking like a reject from the dye factory. It’s an illusion.

It’d make PvP even more interesting, since you can’t judge someone by what they’re wearing, but it’ll also make characters look as nice as their players want. All it costs is a glyph slot and the gear that’s going to be destroyed to create it. Saves me the bank space for holding all of my outfits (shush, you know you do it too), and would make Roleplayers ecstatic.

I can’t see this being gamebreaking OR difficult. Allowing people to have entire sets of usable armor is possibly gamebreaking (although for the poor druid’s sake alone, I hope someone at Blizz is seriously considering it). Allowing a second character gear equip screen could be a huge pain to implement. But an illusion, done by a profession? Less complex by far.

Lesser Glyph of Wardrobe, for great justice!

I do try to keep my “What’s Going on in the World of Ego” posts to a minimum. Ego was and is intended to be a place that people (healing priests especially) can come to learn about the class and the game. It’s awfully hard to do that when every other post is talking about a boss we’ve downed or a piece of gear that’s dropped - some of you are past me in progression and some are still in earlier level content. I wanted a blog that appealed to people regardless of their in-game advancement or level.

That being said, sometimes it’s nice to know just what the blogger behind the blog has been up to.

Guild
A bunch of old guildmates and friends from our guild on Kirin Tor got back together to form a new guild, Vanguard. To kill time between now and the expansion, we’ve been doing Karazhan runs for badges and running Zul’Aman as often as we possibly can, trying to get a full set of Amani Warbears for our guildmembers.

Bearwatch 2008
The recent announcement that the expansion is coming in November, and that the pre-expansion patch will spell the death of the Amani Warbears has kicked us into even higher gear. It took two weeks for us to get our ZA runs up to speed (we had some folks who needed gear, and all of us were very very rusty) but ever since then, we’ve been cranking out two bears a week. We’re on bear 6/10, and everyone in the guild is holding their breath, wondering whether we’ll have time to finish before the patch.

I may be one of the only Warcraft players hoping that the expansion gets pushed back just a tiiiiny smidge.

One of our guildmembers (he comments here under the name of “Shatter”) has been creating a lot of movies for us - recording some of our runs, creating some recruitment videos (we aren’t currently recruiting, but they’re a lot of fun anyway) and basically just tickling all of us with his creations. My favorite of the ones he’s done was a monologue by Zul’Jin, inviting us to “play a game”, and complaining about a certain giant-headed, near-sighted gnome.

RavenWatch
Still no Anzu mount for me. We’ve run that blasted thing every day for well over a month now, still no raven mount. When I get that thing, I am going to spend hours, every day, just walking in circles around Shattrath.

Also, whoever made the decision to nerf fear ward because it “won’t be a significant mechanic in BC” can bite me. Anyone who has run heroic Sethekk Halls knows what I’m talking about.

I was going to tame an owl on my hunter, and now I hate the bloody things on sight. One more football rush by one of those birds while I’m in the middle of a critical heal, and I’m going to be chunking bricks at any owl I see in this game.

“What do you mean, you didn’t do anything? Tell that to your cousins in Sethekk!” *waves a brick around menacingly*

Brewfest
Brewfest this year gives Alliance folks one of the very very few chances we ever have to acquire a horde mount - and as a self-proclaimed kodo-hater, I feel it’s significant when I say that the brewfest kodo looks AWESOME.

I prefer my sleek, sporty rides, personally. But if you’re looking for an SUV, there’s nothing hotter than a brewfest kodo.

Vanguard’s been running the BRD alt-swap game since the start of Brewfest, getting as many attempts at the mount as we possibly can. We’ve gotten one ram and four kodos, and enough trinkets to send Ikiss into paroxysms of joy. I hope he chokes on them.

I love this holiday boss idea. Direbrew and the Headless Horseman both take people back to old world locations, and they’re doable by normal groups. I felt that the frost boss was a little too difficult for the average group, but I feel that Direbrew’s fight has a lot of fun and just enough of a challenge to keep it interesting.

Plus, there’s nothing funnier than a beartank druid running around with a giant beer barrel on his head. And any fight which requires players to open their inventory and chug down a mug of beer is aces in my book.

Kudos to Blizz. And Kodos to us. <3

Magister’s Terrace
Oddly enough, despite a TON of heroic Magister’s Terrace runs (everyone in our guild and their alts has the trinkets from there now), we still haven’t gotten another white chocobo or a baby pheonix drop. It’s becoming something of an in-joke - we won’t get any more vanity toys until the raven mount drops for me.

I will say that I hope Blizz takes note of the incredible outcry of disgust at the Delrissa fight in MrT. Any fight THAT incredibly difficult, which can be rendered laughably simple just by bringing a warlock, is stupidly designed. If I wanted to PvP, I would do so. A difficult fight that takes skill to overcome is fabulous. A chaotic fight with no aggro and which requires luck or a specific group makeup to overcome is an insult.

I am both looking forward to and dreading finding out what instances and raids are like in Wrath.

TreeDrood
One of the players that joined us for Vanguard has spent the intervening time leveling up as fast as his little treeDrood heart can possibly level. He’ll be healing Kara with me this week. Wish him luck!

*grins ferally* He’s gonna need it.

Summary
And that’s what we’ve been up to! New guild, Kara badge runs (when we run with ten people instead of seven, it goes much faster), ZA bear runs, heroic farming, Anzu runs, Heroic MrT runs for pets, trinkets, and birdmounts, teasing a tree, and financing a fleet of kodos.

How are YOU spending the time between now and the expansion?

Using my newfound power to communicate with the lesser faction, I have decided to expand my knowledge of this tanking class.  They soak up all that mana I so carefully hoard, only to squander it by having their face mashed in over and over.  Still, better them than me.  So, for your benefit, I managed to scour Azeroth for rumors of the mysterious Aensu.  It wasn’t easy.  This tall, purple creature has not been seen for quite some time.  As a warrior tank, that didn’t come as much of a surprise.  Count on me, though, to act as your tourguide through the wilderness of gnomes, humans, dorfs and spacegoatstalbuks to find this mysterious Kaldorei.

Who currently looks suspiciously like a spacego- draenei.  And a paladin.  But still pure tank.

Hannelore: Word has it that Aensu, warrior tank extraordinaire, has been in hiding for quite some time, now. Criminal background coming to haunt you? An unspeakable bounty on your head? Or a scorned lover just waiting for you to show your face? Or maybe you just got caught up in watching old episodes of Lost? Why hasn’t the world seen you, lately?

Aensu: Not hiding, just adapting to the needs of my comrades. Sure, it’s entirely possible to tank as a warrior with no CC, no salvation, and no mercy from the ravenous dps, but it’s far more efficient to do it as a paladin. You don’t earn Amani War Bears and 100+ badges a week for your raid by tiptoeing through your dungeons with a mage holding each hand.

H: So you’re still out there, just in a different costume. What are your fondest memories of tanking? Favorite dungeon or battleground?

A: Definitely 3-manning old world content with Vonya and Kwane, back when it was “hard” and our “more experienced” guildmates were wiping on the same content with a full group and raid gear. I have a soft spot for Blackrock Depths and all its fiery, dwarfy goodness.

H: That place is becoming famous, here, lately. Tell me, why did you take up tanking, when so many warriors avoid it like the plague and would rather rock the damage charts?

A: Bad pug experiences as both a healer and dps. I knew I could do better.

H: Well, do you ever feel pangs of guilt for not being born a gnome?

A: No, but I do sometimes feel pangs of regret for being born a night elf.

H: HAH! Of course. You have my sympathy, there. Speaking of which, what did it feel like to be constantly surrounded by ‘the prettiest races’ on Azeroth? At least until my people decided to join the fight again and take up opposition to your Alliance.

A: Not terribly dissimilar to being surrounded by the ugliest races on Azeroth. I’ll take being surrounded by stupid and pretty over being surrounded by stupid and ugly any day. Not to mention, have you ever smelled a group of Tauren, Orcs and Forsaken after a sweaty dungeon romp?

H: Ugh, yes. Moving on…Is there any power or ability you wish you had as a warrior tank? You can make something up, or borrow from someone else’s class or race.

A: The power to use my blacksmithing skills to repair my own equipment. I can forge exotic metals and the primal forces of nature itself into Stormherald, Crusher of Dreams and Provoker of Infinite Whining, but I have to pay some guy to put the edge back on VanCleef’s dinky sword? Come on!

H: What was the worst part about being a warrior tank?

A: Watching my performance plateau and even decline in some areas as my gear improved. You know you’ve arrived at Badscaling, USA when you have to start taking your pants off just to do your job. The worst part was I didn’t even get any tips!

H: Well, there’s a lot of speculation flying around about upcoming changes - anything you’re looking forward to, or dreading? I’d especially like to hear about your dread.

A: I’m very much looking forward to it, in fact. They’re attempting to do exactly what I wanted them to do: create parity among the tanking classes. I’m sure there’s plenty gnashing of teeth and rending of clothing among some old school warriors about hybrids taking their jobs. Personally, I’m not heavily invested in any particular class, just tanking in general. I’ll be a shield spec shaman tank if that’s what it takes to get the job done. Those who got their positions by virtue of being a protection spec warrior rather than actually being any good at tanking or knowing anything about it deserve their downfall.

H: Do you have dreams of being a tauren?

A: I once dreamed about a talking hamburger, does that count?

H: Uh. Yes.

Aye, mateys, it be Talk Like a Pirate Day!

Scope out yer local Big City folk fer a hint ‘o tha fun, then hoist the mainsel and trawl down to Booty Bay for some ale, wenchings, an piratey stuff. 

Yarrr!

(…I have to do this ALL day?!  What the blazes is ‘wenchings’?)

The Proposal
Not content merely to think of one Cooking Specialization (Condiment Chef), we here at EgoCorp have been working furiously around the clock to bring you a SECOND specialization.

We present to you…Brewmaster.

More Than Just Beer
Some may feel that a Brewmaster should be dedicated to the art of alcoholic beverages, content to serve a mostly-dwarven population, rejoicing at the ultimate compliment of “at least it didn’t make me blind.”

No! I decry such a wan and lifeless description.

Certainly, the Brewmaster should be known for drink that would put hair on a forsaken’s chest, brews that would knock a night elf into the Chartreuse Dream, concoctions that could have the most hardened orc warrior babbling about his love life.

Beers, yes, but not JUST beers.

I say a Brewmaster’s trade and skill with a still should be aknowledged with even greater feats.

Cleansers - Astringent and heavily acidic, made from a volatile concoction of wolpertinger fur and warp stalker scales which would eat the color from an armor set, leaving a silvery gray finish. This would be appropriate for the discerning adventurer seeking to homogenize a jester-like concoction of gear.

Oils - Basilisk spit and harpy tears combine to create an oil that should be swiftly spread over a broken weapon or piece of armor to provide a temporary, quick-hardening seal, giving that armor 1 durability point for an hour and allowing the adventurer to continue his or her swath of violence without a pesky trip back to town.

Poisons - Serpent venom, Wasp poison, and Worm spit combine to make a poison so easy to apply that anyone can do it (not just rogues)! A single vial will last an adventurer at least half an hour when applied to daggers, swords, mallets, or even arrows!

Potions - not the drinkable kind. Sleep potions, made from basilisk spinal fluid, thrown in battle to send all nearby enemies into a blissful snooze for a short time. Love potions, made from succubus blood and (oddly enough) a few drops from a skunk gland will send any mob into a frenzy, increasing a mob’s attention on the thrower. Tanks are advised to wear protection. Even one or two that could be thrown on group members to wake them up or cleanse a magic or poison effect.

Sauces - They would, of course, also provide some of the ingredients needed by the Condiment Spec.

Tricks - “Specialty” drinks. Zangarmarsh Zingers - one drink and you glow like a wasp for ten minutes. Cenarion Thicket Shots, for someone wanting to see the world in purples and greens.

Azeroth DESERVES more beer, and players deserve more options that are fun, useful, or just plain silly. Brewmaster is the obvious solution to these problems!

(Okay, okay, some of those things probably should be made by alchemists. But they’d be fun to have regardless of who made them!)

As most of you probably know by now, Priest Racials are being dramatically changed. Some appear to be disappearing (this has not been confirmed, but they are rather pointedly not mentioned in any of the announcements I’ve seen) and others are being given to ALL priests.

Over at World of Matticus, they’ve had three different posts on the subject, ranging from the original announcement, the Twitterati reaction (if that word isn’t in full use by the end of the year, it’ll be a crying shame), and Wyn’s personal thoughts on the matter.

To many people, this is a Big Deal.

My opinion? Summed up in a single word, all I can say is “Overdue”.

Do you remember the outcry when Draenei priests were given Fear Ward? Some of you do, I’m sure. How many dwarf priests cried foul, exclaimed bitterly that they had rolled a race they hated just so they could be the “best” priest?

How many blog posts have there been about the priest racials, weighing them and grading them, telling you that if you picked Night Elf, you were crippling yourself? Grace of Elune? Increasing dodge and agility? Are you SERIOUS? A tank would sell his second-favorite grandmother for that ability, but a priest?

The truth of the matter was that the priest racials were unbalanced, and ridiculously so. I think that they were intended to be neat little spells that would give someone a little extra something for choosing a particular race, and what they ended up doing is penalizing some and forcing others into decisions they might regret later.

Personally? I loved my dwarf priest, with her propeller braids. HOWEVER, I do think that dwarf women don’t look as nice in robes as many of the other classes, and yes, that mattered to me. I absolutely fell in love with the drae from the very first screenshots released of them. I knew I was rerolling months before Burning Crusade came out, regardless of the priest racials they were given, and even if it meant I wouldn’t have Fear Ward anymore.

In the end, Drae priests pulled the long straw when it came to racials. Fear Ward AND Symbol of Hope? If all the things that were ever priest racials were put into a pot and every priest could only pick two, I guarantee those two would be the MOST selected abilities.

And then Fear Ward got nerfed and given to everyone, but THAT’s a totally different story.

I suppose the point of all my rambling is that nobody should have been penalized for the race they chose, and that is what was happening with priest racials. No raid leader should ever have to look at two bright priest faces and choose one over the other because a racial might make a difference in a battle. Oh, you rolled a troll? Too bad, looks like you don’t get to raid this week.

It’s an issue of balance.

Some of the racials that are disappearing are going to cause a lot of hubbub in the PvP community, and I know that I cannot comment on that perspective at all, so I’m not even going to try. I have never used Chastise, but that doesn’t make it worthless to the gaming community as a whole.

Does this decision homogenize the priest community?

Yes and no. It levels the playing field a little, and makes some very nice spells and abilities available to ALL priests.

It’s how you USE what you’ve been given that sets you apart from the priests around you. A bad priest without Symbol of Hope is not suddenly going to become a great priest just because of that spell, but their group is still going to benefit from them using it.

This, of course, raises the question of whether or not non-priest racials are coming under scrutiny as well. And before you start your outcry of denial on THAT front, ask yourself whether human rogues and orc hunters really and truly make sense to be better at what they do than the other races? Some of the regular racials aren’t just an extra boost to Jewelcrafting, you know.