I feel dirty

My mage alt is a scribe, and I’ve been selling the glyphs that I’ve been making as I level Inscription. One of the glyphs I put on the AH was the Glyph of Consecration, which, as we all know, is a terrible glyph.

So I’m greedily pawing through various “Auction Sold” letters on this alt yesterday and I got the gold from selling said godawful glyph. From the name of the character that bought it, I could tell the unlucky purchaser was a tank.

Even though she’s only lvl 37 (as I discovered via the Armory), I feel compelled to send her a tell to implore her not to use the glyph and perhaps offer to sell her a better fitting one. Anything to alleviate my guilt over enabling this budding tank to trod the dark path.

Anything except a refund… I have a business to run after all.

I can’t fight this feeling anymore

I’m respeccing holy when I get home tonight.

I’ll rebrand this blog Righteous Wavy Fingers tomorrow.

Edit: That was lame, I’m sorry. Though could be worse …

Now THIS is tanking

I’m still coming down from the adrenaline high from this…

We’re finishing up the week’s Naxx25, at Kel’Thuzad, on the third attempt. We have two DK offtanks to pick up the adds. At 15% both OTs go down. In a panic I quickly taunt the adds off of my Druid healer focus, Ildara.

And there I am, all four adds plus KT on me. Immediately a feeling of dreads casts over me as pessimistic tidings of doom start shooting through my mind: not enough dps are up, those adds will eventually overpower you with their stacking buff… you can’t see void zones… people are too close, you’re gonna get iceblocked!!

It was quite possibly the longest 45 seconds or so of my life, but we did it. KT went down and the adds fled to whence they came from.

I have no idea how I did it, but I give most of the credit to the healers.

(In case you’re wondering, I ended up third on the damage done chart, with around 2500 dps).

“The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance”

– Robert R. Coveyou

I’m going to digress from Paladining issues for the moment to indulge in something that has been bothering me for some time. As you might know from reading my various raid recaps, my guild distributes loot using a tiered rolling system, the heart of which is the ever trusty /roll.

As such the yellow-tinted “x has rolled y” announcements are typically flying around non-stop during the raid, and invariably someone says “oh boy you just rolled a 100, there goes your only high roll of the night.”

NO! That’s not how the system works!

WoW uses what’s called a “pseudo-random number generator” to produce the results of a /roll, /random, or the various need/greed rolls that the game generates.

I’m no where near qualified nor intelligent enough to fully explain what a PRNG means, but what it boils down to is this: when you type /roll into the client, the server returns a value based on a complex algorithm that it stores in a generator library server-side. And the starting point of that algorithm is a “seed state,” a number that the whole formula tumbles down from to produce the inevitable result.

Rolls in WoW are absolutely not random, cf:

So while the numbers can not be truly random, we have done what we can to make them as random as possible.

Rolls in WoW are actually nothing more than the answer to a math problem that you initiated. So in fact, when you typed /roll into the client and hit enter, at that exact millisecond, you could not have gotten any other result.

Like another thing that people say that bothers me: “I am lucky to have been born in x.” That’s not how it works! You are the result of two different genetic sources combining in a unique way, and as such, you could not be the offspring of any other pairing of creatures on this planet other than your two parents. Rolling works in exactly the same way.

Luck has nothing to do with it. That 1 you just rolled on the Betrayer of Humanity means that you just picked a really crappy moment to type /roll.

And if you roll a number above 90 during the course of a night, that doesn’t preclude you from repeating that feat again later in the raid.

Sorry for the digression. I’m a very skeptical person, and silliness like assuming that you only get one high roll a night tends to get my goat. We now return you to your regularly scheduled RiDef.

Gender bending with your Iron Boot Flask

I’ve been unable to find time to write anything substantive for the site due to being swamped at work… where I may or may not do most of my blogging.

In any case, to ameliorate my absense, here’s a fun trick some of my friends have been doing and all it requires is an Iron Boot Flask. You also need a female toon. And be Horde… do Dranei or Night Elves get turned into humans in CoT: Durnholde or Stratholme? Sorry, guess it requires a lot.

While in CoT: Stratholme/Durnholde if you’re getting sick of looking at your silly human female, with their moppish do’s and their Malibu Stacy-esque emotes, use the Iron Boot Flask. You’ll notice that no matter what you’ll be turned into a male Iron Dwarf.

Cool enough, but when the effect wears off you’ll still be male!

Instant sex change, without the $25 surcharge.

Moreover, if you want to get crazy, pair it with the Orb of the Sin’Dorei outside of an instance. This works for any race as long as you’re female. Now you’ll be a male Blood Elf rather than a female one. Works with other appearance-changing items as you’d imagine.

Happy bending!

Zoom zoom

Shamelessly stolen from WoW Insider, but this is so cool…

In 3.1, healadins get a talent called Aura Mastery, which improves the effects for all auras 100% for 10 secs. It works for Crusader Aura too, which means that 20% speed bonus becomes a 40% speed bonus.

Look at that pally go!