Why I’m Opting In to RealID

First thing’s first: This is going to be rambly. I forgot my anti depressants at my parents’ house and am rather light-headed and nonsensical already – everybody’s affected differently. If I piss someone off, so be it.

So, there’s a lot of concern about privacy regarding RealID. I think y’all ought to read this post before continuing the incoherent rage and whining, first off, and secondly, I need y’all to think about social media.

If you’re signed on to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or any number of other social networking sites, your privacy is already out the window. Even if you’re careful about what you post. If you order pizza, your information is already out there. If you rent movies from your local grocery store, there’s another batch of people with your information. If you run your own website, finding out about you is as simple as doing a WHOIS of your domain (if you didn’t put your domain under a pseudonym or something).

Privacy on the internet is a myth. If you put information out there, you cannot take it back. No matter how paranoid you are, someone, some company, somewhere, has something on you.

Scary, huh?

If someone wants to find something out about you and they know what tools they need to do so, they can. If you race-changed and name-changed and then server-transferred a character to get away from someone, they can figure out where you went (there are WoW detective sites that actually track transfers and race changes). Pre-RealID WoW is no more private than post-RealID WoW.

I will be opting in to RealID because a) Most people already know my real name by now (Parasite Eve, sets people on fire, sings, there you go), b) I’m not afraid to tell people “Not right now, I’m busy”, c) I’m not afraid to simply not accept friend requests from people I don’t like.

If people take my behaviour personally, that’s their problem, not mine. I already have someone taking my snarkiness as a personal affront whenever it’s her hubby (who, by the by, can defend himself he’s an adult for fuck’s sake) that’s snarked after he acts like a fuckwad (hey, he’s a dick to other people sometimes, too, I figure he’s earned it). The best part is that afterward he doesn’t take it personally. Why should he? Why should anybody?

If I don’t want to spend time with you, I’ll tell you. If I want to be left alone, I’ll tell you. If I don’t want you knowing where my characters are at all times, you’ll know. Do I give a fuck if you know my e-mail address? No. I use the same e-mail address for everything. I don’t have the attention span to have a different fucking e-mail address for each little thing that I do.

And chances are, if I let you refer to me by my first name, I’ll happily let you stalk add me (that means you, people with my cell phone number).

You have more power with this thing than you think you do, but if your freak-out is lack of privacy, darlings? You’re on the internet. You’re already without privacy.

I hope Blizzard’s enjoying my chat records~

Matojo’s Adventures in DDO

So, while I wait to get my account back, I’ve been poking at a game I’ve been wanting to try for a while – Dungeons and Dragons Online.

The gameplay is interesting and some aspects are rather clunky compared to WoW, but it’s enough to keep me coming back. I mean, I’ve wanted more D&D experience for a while and since I can’t get into tabletop around here, I figured, why not? Maybe I’ll have to check out some of the other single player games, too (the Forgotten Realms versions, I guess that’s all that’s out there?).

For a newbie like me, working with the targeting system is a little unwieldy. It does operate on D&D rules and requires more movement to be effective than what WoW does. The skill/feat system is different, too, with some classes not having much in terms of buttons they can hit until much later in the game.

I have mixed feelings on the DDO Store that mainly stem from the idea of how difficult the information is to even find at first. Prices aren’t too bad for store points, but I dont’ know how earning them via the Favour system compares yet so I can’t comment that way. I have no problem paying for some game features (like Drow and Warforged).

My suggestions to anybody that tries to pick up the game are: Pay attention to tooltips, read the tooltips on your character sheet, pick up a little D&D info before you start and adjust the keyboard turning speed/mouse look speed before going too far – the starting values make movement slow, unwieldy and almost made me drop the game. Also? Don’t try to play the game in windowed mode – DDO’s windowed mode is horrible.

Also, Jesus Jumping Murphy do not start with a bard.

I’m not used to mob killing not contributing to experience, either, so THAT is a bizarre thing for me.

At the moment I’m running a Wizard (Tuhina Dawngarde), Rogue (Kerriganne Shadowfoot), Fighter (Erbin Warglaive), Paladin (Greenshanks) and Cleric (I forget, no seriously). I don’t have much rogue, paladin or cleric experience but I am a big fan of the wizard and fighter’s pewpew.

TL;DR – DDO, though clunky and it feels more like a single-player dungeon crawl than an MMO, is still interesting enough to keep my attention while I wait for my WoW account to come back. I MISS MY HARBIES. ;_;

The Druid, the RNG and the Sudden But Inevitable Betrayal

My Druid, Varkev, hit 80 on… Wednesday night, I think. Two respecs of his Resto tree and 3k gold down the tubes later, his resto gear was better than his feral gear and I decided to attempt healing a regular. That went well (despite my lack of trinket and several greens), then I found Je’Tze’s Bell on the Auction House for 750g, quickly nabbed the rest of the money I needed for that, aaand… Varkev had his trinket slots filled. I had enough emblems from my daily regulars during the leveling phase that I was able to afford an Idol of Flaring Growth, then a handful of heroics later, The Egg of Mortal Essence to replace that pesky green trinket.

I was shoved into Heroic ToC, flailing and cursing, only to find that I managed it pretty well and walked away with several delicious drops. Oh, and a feral helmet.

Though, I’m thinking I’ll drop the feral off-spec and go Resto/Boomkin.

Needless to say, I was pretty damned proud of my little druid once all was said and done. I logged off feeling damned good about the bugger.

Then I signed into my e-mail this morning to see a ‘password reset’ notice from Blizzard and I knew exactly what was going on.

To be honest, I figured I’d be hacked eventually. I didn’t get an authenticator ’cause I a) just didn’t care and b) didn’t’ want to spend the money. I’d also lose my brain if it wasn’t in my skull, so the chances of it going missing are pretty high. However, I do know what got me – the flash vulnerability from last week. If I had known about it last week, however, I would have updated ASAP.

So, totally my own fault.

The great part is that the hackers wouldn’t have been able to get much worth out of my accounts because, um, I didn’t really have much left over from enchanting and gemming Varkev’s new gear, ’cause I was lazy and hadn’t been working very hard to make more money. They stripped my 80s, but none of my alts that were below 80 and not my hunter.

Derp Derp.

Aw well, I think that’s Djehuty telling me to take a break.

Thanks to Khydann for the screenies of my characters popping in and out of /tbdf, and for reporting the accounts – also, for letting me know and confirming my suspicions. ♥

Tool of the Day: Koonaki, The Strong, Silent Type

Ladies and gentlemen (and not-so-gentle-men), today, Matojo lets you all hear her tell you who’s the fucking tool. Put your hands together, put your headphones on, and pardon the sound quality of the first ever Troll Bouquet Tool of the Day Voice Post.

Matojo vs. The Healer That Tried to Kill Her

Matojo Plays “Ms. Obvious”

Guys, guys, guys, guess what?

I’m into snark and snark communities. Shocking, no? Well, I guess if you’ve never read anything here, it might be. Or… if you’ve never checked out the categories dropdown.

Or searched the term ‘snark’ on this blog. Yeah.

Sorry darlings, but it takes even less than Google’s cache to out me as a snark fan – it’s not exactly something that I hide, for fuck’s sake. ‘Course, I also believe that being an asshole for the sake of being an asshole really sucks. Want proof, here it is. I need to write a version of that for the RP crowd.

In case it’s not obvious, no, I don’t have a lot of content going this weekend. It’s a lazy weekend after a nutty week, though I am picking at Taashti’s storyline and, y’know, if you’re into Shamans and fanfic you ought to peek at Way of the Totem. Readers, if you have fiction that you’d like plugged, e-mail me at matojo@trollbouquet.ca (and be patient).

This weekend – and much of the week – has been spent on Zul’jin, except for a spell where the server’s hamster died and I ran around a little bit on Moon Guard. I’ve basically fallen into my trap of “I must get these professions leveled before ANYTHING ELSE” and thus, I wind up getting sucked into the pit that is the professions grind. Lovely. The Death Knight is caught up, however, but the paladin still has mining to do – for now she’s grinding leather for Taashti’s leatherworking.

According to the poll, I see Grin has two fangirls so far – or fanboys, not sure which. Ho ho ho, fatTroll will be pleased.

Blogosphere, have you tried anything new and unusual (for you) in WoW? Picked up any new classes? Share! Think of it as wow_ladies’ Capslock Friday but without the Capslock. Share-a-lot Saturday? Feh. Type away.

I Has Seekrit.

I has a seekrit.

No, I’m not a Troll in real life – that would make working with the fire service a bit more challenging than it is, what with having bones sticking out of my face and a wild hairdo. No.

I… like watching train wrecks.

I’m a member of a couple of Livejournal snark communities – including warcraftsues, bad_rpers_suck and dot_pagan_snark – and I frequently bounce my snarky tendencies off my friends. I’m a snarky person. The only thing that stops me from being directly snarky to people, more often than not, is that, well, I’m not a big fan of confrontation.

So, suffice it to say I… kind of like watching drama that doesn’t involve me or my friends.

I’m a voyeur.

This is probably why I’m a big fan of in-character drama, why I drool a little over the possibility of getting some of my characters into trouble or watching other characters deal with crap being flung their way.

I think that’s one reason why I’m a roleplayer – I can watch all this cray-cray shit happen to these fictional beings without having anything happen to me. I mean, not counting dealing with players that are equally cray-cray as the shit that goes down (I could tell such stories), of course.

Tell me I’m not the only one.

Ranting on a FailKnight

Good morning, audience!

This weekend, I had the pleasure of schooling a fellow Death Knight in the art of not sucking. Sort of. It was more a matter of me foaming at the mouth and him saying “I’ll change, I’ll change”. Whether or not he’ll listen to me is a topic for another post.

In a conversation on how well Death Knights manage the damage they take, I pointed out that I am not too difficult to heal – in fact, I’m apparently so easy that my friend Wyat, on his slightly lowly geared but nonetheless awesome shaman, was letting me take damage because he was bored. This Knight, who I shall name Mo, told the channel that a healer once told him that he was harder to heal than her Death Knight friend.

“Then you have a gear issue,” I said as I pulled up Armory.

I found:

• A distinct lack of enchants.
• Two pure parry gems.
• This spec.
• Dual wielding – without DW talents!

“No, nevermind,” I added. “You have more issues than just gear.”

If one intends to tank, please, for the love of kittens (and to save yourself from being brutally torn asunder by serious or semi-serious DK tanks like myself) – take the first-tier tanking talents. They are: Blade Barrier, Toughness and Anticipation. In the course of making use of your skill priority, Blade Barrier will activate (whenever your Blood Runes are on cooldown), which gives your healer some time to recover. Toughness adds to the reduction in squishy by adding more armour to what you already have. Anticipation gives you more dodge – everybody likes dodge!

Parry gems are problematic because parry suffers more from diminishing returns than dodge does (the curve for DR on Dodge is 88%, 47% for Parry). I would suggest Regal Twilight Opal/Regal Dreadstone for the stamina (Enduring Forest Emerald/Enduring Eye of Zul if one needs to hit the defense cap but doesn’t need enough to warrant a pure Defense gem, I’m using Stalwart gems in my red slots until I figure out how to re-arrange my gemming now that I’m at the Defense cap). Those who raid will be gemming for stamina regardless of socket bonuses – remember, raids are not my focus.

Regarding dual wielding: Unless you have the proper fucking talents, don’t do it. A lot of people go on about how dual wield tanking is so not something that should be done and omg! Dual wield tanks suck – those people are about a patch behind. Dual wield tanking is viable with the proper set of talents and stats, end of story. There, I said it. Don’t believe me? Read Chill of the Grave. You also might want to check out TankSpot’s Death Knight Tank Guide.

Next – enchant your gear. ILevel 200 blues? Enchant them. Greens? Get thee to the Auction House, and if you don’t have any money, what the hell? Check the categories. I’m not going over making money in this article. Buy yourself some entry-level crafted tanking gear (Tempered Saronite, Tempred Titansteel, Titanium Rings and Necklaces), then enchant.

TL;DR – ATTENTION FAILKNIGHTS: Get yourself a proper tank spec. Look! Two examples and three templates. Enchant your gear. Hit Defense cap, then start upping your Stamina while getting the Hit and Expertise soft caps with some Strength, Dodge and Parry on the side. Don’t dual wield if you’re not using the proper Frost talents.

Remember: If you find that you’re squishier than you’d like – check your spec, then your stats, gear, gems and enchants and finally, your rotation/priority system. There is always a way to fix it, and it is not the class. We are spiky, not squishy.

Matojo Is A Lemming: Circle of Healers

Several other healers have filled this out – it started with Miss Medicina -  so I figure it’s my turn too. There’s a tank version that I’ll be digging into at some other point!

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Healer’s Lament, Tank Rising

I love healing. In fact, I love it so much that sometimes I get a little irrational about it.

I am a little too protective of my role as healer; sometimes I get slightly hurt when another healer is suggested and not me or I’m asked to shoot things with my hunter. This is, of course, really insanely dumb and I need to get over it – but how?

Part of me is kinda excited about tanking: I have Gahiji, my baby Death Knight, who is slowly approaching the point of not being a baby anymore. He’s two levels away from 80, from gearing for Heroics, from being in demand among a set of guilds that doesn’t have very many tanks (the Harbingers of War have three, at most, with only one being available very often while The Refuge has one full-time available-pretty-damn-often tank), and he’s kinda sexy for a dead guy. The biggest problem with him is that he is a little on the emo side, as many dead people are.

But … he’s a beast. A beast.

There you go, self, something to be excited about. Tank moar, dammit.

Yeah. I think I can be okay with hearing, “Hey Mat, do you wanna hop on ‘Hiji and tank?”

I just have to find a DPS toon that I, you know, enjoy, and for some reason hunter ain’t it. I prefer soloing on my hunter. I can do crazy, crazy stuff.

I’m getting pretty happy over the thought of having my Warlock blast through Northrend, though…

On a different note! My mage, Kombe, has 1% of a level to go ’til 77. I AM SO NOT READY FOR THIS WHAT THE CRAP HOW DID YOU LEVEL SO FAST. I replaced his Frost spec with a Frostfire Bolt spec to see how that goes, I’m having a hard time figuring it out on a solo level.

“FFB – AUGH IT’S HEADED RIGHT FOR ME – Scorch, Living Bomb, FFB FFB FF – oh dead okay. Heeeeee it asploded.”

Between Warlock (71), Mage (76) and Rogue (75) I really should be able to find a DPS class that makes me happy! It’s just… picking one.