It has gone from half-full to half-empty.

First off, I don't know who these girls are, but when doing a google image search for an appropriate image when talking about the Cata alpha. The search term Alpha came up with this, and lets face it who doesn't love hot college girls?

Anyway back to the real reason behind this post. With all the leaked alpha information and the current state of the alpha builds I have to revise my earlier estimates and move from the optimist column to the pessimist column. I no longer believe that Cata will be out in august, although I am still skeptical that it will come out after Blizzcon. I really feel a November release is too far away. So maybe events will unfold something like this. Cata release sometime late September, early October. Blizzcon late October, with an announcement of the next expansion, or a tease for the next gen MMO. Diablo 3 release sometime in first quarter 2011.

Ever the optimist I suppose.

The road. It has come to an end.

Tomorrow marks the last day of Ex Obscurum as a guild on Farstriders. The GM's and most of the core raiders have transfered to Emerald Dream, to become a more progression minded raid guild. I have been a member of Ex Obscurum for two and a half years and it was an incredibly difficult decision to stay on the low population, slow progression Farstriders realm. But since I have retired from progression raiding I could not rationalize the cost of server transferring 5 toons. I know it is kind of silly to want to keep all toons together, but I like to be able to move things around and keep within a single server community. So I bid a fond farewell to all my friends in Ex Ob, and wish them luck in their 25 man hard mode progression. Kick the Lich King in the ass for me!

I have joined up with a pretty organized guild on Farstriders, Dark and Light. I have become ranged DPS in their second core raid group. What does this mean? It means I am raiding on the mage, and doing guild 10 man pugs on my Shaman. The best part is Dark and Light is a uber casual guild. My team raids 3 nights a week, two hours per raid, and they have OK'd my absence on the first raid night, due to my commitment to my sons Boy Scout troop. So I am pretty confident I can put 4 hours of my life per week into organized raiding. This makes me happy, and allows me to see some progression, and maybe even the Lich King before Cata comes out.

On to raiding news. Team 2 is making its first steps into ICC, last night we made it past Marrowgar and Lady Deathwhisper. Sunday night it will be gunship, and a few attempts on Saurfang. I know a lot of people think this is nearing "old" content. But when you are just now stepping into ICC it is still pretty tough.

I remember healing Lady Deathwhisper 25 pre-nerf and thinking the encounter was a joke. Then they nerfed it and I laughed at how simple it was for my well geared, well organized guild that had raided more or less with the same group as a 25 man since SCC in BC. Well for a 10 man team that has only been raiding together for close to a month. Even with the 15% ICC buff that Lady was no joke. We took I think 4 attempts to down her. I think our main problem was a shortage of physical DPS. Our DPS consisted of a ret pally, prot pally, and finally brought in a hunter alt to get her down. The casters had no problem dealing with out adds, but with so much of the pallys DPS coming from Holy damage it was tough going. On our final attempt we managed to break the mana shield and get the Lady to about 75%.

The group decided to go one more time, even though we had passed our scheduled end time. Fourth time was the charm, we re assigned DPS, did a better job of marking physical DPS targets, and managed to actually get a few seconds of breathing room between add spawns. I actually remembered to slow targets, and decurse casters when needed. We downed Lady Deathwhisper with two tanks, two healers and me left alive. I tell you that last 8% with less than a minute on the enrage timer and no other DPS left up put a lot of pressure on my to squeeze out every ounce of DPS I could.

It was the most fun I have had in a raid in a long time. The group wasn't as well organized as I was used to, it felt weird for the raid leader to explain boss strategies before each pull, as in Ex Ob, if you didn't do your research and learn the fights, you didn't raid. But over all it was an incredible feeling to finally down a boss we were struggling with.

I will miss Ex Ob, but I think I have found a new home.

On a side note, the English translation of the latin Ex Obscurum is "From Darkness" or our of Darkness. I think it is fitting that my new home is Dark and Light!

Cataclysm predictions...

I have for a very long time stated my prediction that Cataclysm will be released this August. I don't know why I have felt so strongly about this but I do. I have posted this prediction many times here, and again I will re-affirm that prediction. If I am wrong I'm wrong. But I think I have some pretty good data to back up my thoughts. Today another piece of the puzzle dropped into place.

Today Blizzard announced that Starcraft 2 will be released July 27th. Blizzard has stated many times that some of the new Cataclysm features will be integration into Battlenet2.0. With Starcraft's release the end of July, that gives them a full month (I am guessing a late August release) to work out the bugs, and roll out Cataclysm.

Today the Cataclysm Beta realm character transfer servers are active. So I am guessing the beta should be starting around the 15th of this month. The Wrath beta was around 4 months. I am being pretty generous here, but assuming the familiarity the Dev's have with the tools, they can cut that down to 90 days or so. Worst case they are in beta foe 105 days and that hits my end of August guess.

Blizzcon is scheduled for October this year. I can't imagine we will be in beta for 7 months, to hit the November 2'nd release date I have heard bandied about. Also I just cant see them wasting dev time (not that Blizzcon is a waste per se) with just 2 weeks between Blizzcon and a major release. I also think Blizzcon will be more focused on Diablo 3, the other SC2 campaigns and possibly a teaser for whatever comes after Cata, as well as some news on the nextgen MMO.

I would to hear somebody tell me why I am wrong. But until then, I'll live with my glass half-full and hope for a Cata Release by the end of August.

Shiki Summarizes Clash of the Titans in WoW terms

Shiki is a guildie, she wrote this and I was so entertained I had to share...

So there was a guy named Perseus that liked to fish. He spent his entire life leveling his fishing skill with a few of his close friends, until one day the opposing faction decided to raid their spot. His friends left their corpses in the water and rerolled on a PvE server, because leveling as PvP was too frustrating.

With his fishing guild disbanded, Perseus traveled to the main city to look for another guild, and he joined . All he wanted to do was fish, but wanted him to be a warrior and defeat a world boss event before it laid waste to the main city.

But first, he needed some gear. So the GL of told Perseus to put a raid together and go farm some gear.

Perseus is a horrible raid coordinator. His raid had like 7 warriors, two hunters and a pug priest. The priest wasn’t very good. She sucked at healing and really only followed them around. The hunters were pro though. After leaving the city, Perseus finds a cool epic world drop sword.

As they traveled across the land, Perseus ended up getting cursed, and there was no way to remove it because they were too stupid to bring mages. As the curse is sapping his HP, they encounter a mini-encounter of giant scorpions and, after a while of fighting, managed to win the fight with seconds to spare on the enrage timer. The two hunters quit the raid after realizing they were the only two dps above the tank. Unfortunately by now the curse has depleted like 90% of Perseus health, so they have to find a mage.

Eventually they do find a mage, and he decurses Perseus, who also gets a cool faction shield to tank with. After losing the hunters, they invite the mage to the raid because it would be useful to have a decurse and biscuits, and continue on to the top of the mountain to turn in a quest to go fight the snake boss.

After turning in the quest to the creepy old ladies at the top of the hill, they head off to the docks in the lower city to go across to the other continent where the next quest is. As they prepare to go into the lake, the priestess AFKs and leaves the others to go into the lair for some odd reason.

When the encounter begins, most of the dps run off the edge, the rest pull aggro and get 1shotted by Medusa, leaving only the mage and two other warriors to beat the boss without any heals. The mage suicides to take a ton of Medusa’s health, as the other warrior dies while trying to use the stalactite mechanic to deal damage as well, but dies before he can do it again.

Perseus solos the rest of Medusa’s health and gets his trinket to drop. After returning to the outside, Perseus sees the afk priest get ganked by a rogue, so he flags pvp and bladestorms the rogue off the edge of a cliff. The priest releases her spirit to corpse run, but gives up because there’s no nearby graveyard.

Perseus gets a quest reward flying mount as a pat of his epic quest chain, and flies back to the main city to put together another group for the world boss event.

As he returns, two of the officers of (the GL and his daughter) are in a trade chat war with the guild over who is the better guild, and the daughter goes to solo the Kraken to prove a point. She gets sapped mid-battle as the Kraken spawns in the middle of the city, and the GL gets killed by one of the officers of .

After a long chase scene that involved the hunters running through the city on a scorpion (Leave it to the huntards to leave a guild raid to farm a mount…) Perceus goes to tank the kraken boss without a raid. The trinket from Medusa actually helped him one-shot the boss, but the platform collapsed duringt he rp event and the sapped officer of fell into the water.

Perseus goes to save her, and she offers to promote him to GL because he dad quit the game, but he’s all “hell no!” and /gquits the guild to run around on his horse.

He hooks up with the priest after she finally spirit rezzed.

The end!

I have a deep, dark and dirty secret.

I have been playing a Mage for some time now and I am loving it. I recently also joined a new raiding guild with her. Their raid schedule is much more forgiving than any guild I have ever worked with. They raid 3 nights per week, 2 hours per night, and they are doing old content. They are doing Ulduar and ToC with the occasional foray into ICC for the first boss. Even with my currently ridiculously restricted schedule I can fit 4 hours a week into my life to raid (one night is Boy Scout night with the kid so no raiding on Tuesdays). Not only is the 4 hours per week very doable it gives me some time to farm mats and contribute to the guild and maintain the tricky home life balance.

My mage is wearing almost exclusively valor gear, with the exceptionally embaresing blue sandals from Nexus, and there is no badge shoes available (ok there are but I refuse to spend 40 badges on i213 shoes). I hope to someday get a HoR/FoS to pick up the i219 pieces I could use.

This week I got in on two raids, we did the first section of Ulduar the first night, and Marrowgar the second night. I think I held my own at a respectable 5k dps on trash, and just under 4k on bosses. I think if I manage to replace the few low ilevel pieces with Ulduar/ToC stuff in the next few weeks I'll be a perfectly capable DPS heading into ICC in June like the guild plans.

I think my Shamaning is on hold until Cata comes out, as I just can't muster the availability to raid full time right now. I will however still be here, wiping PuG's and putting my two cents into all the upcoming changes to my beloved healing Shaman.

It's the end of the world as we know it!

And I feel Fine!

Remember back in November when the Blizzard pet store debuted with the super cute Pandaren Monk pet and the Mini K'T pets? The forum troll, and blog rolls exploded with cries of foul and how this is the first step into the void that can never be taken back. They said WoW would be ruined for ever, and any day now we will all be able to buy epic, nay LEGENDARY items from the Blizzard store for real money. Thus ruining the game for every one forever.

Because we all know if you have the ability to pay for in-game it it will completely destroy the ecosystem. Well it has been 6 months since the introduction of the Blizzard pet store, I did purchase both the Lil K.T. and Pandaren. You know what? My server is still chugging along, the game still works and nothing was ruined due to the massive influx of tiny pets. I still take out my K'T or Pandaren whenever I raid during trash, or when farming heroics. But I take out any of the 57 other pets I farmed as well. I am a mini pet junkie, and I will farm, buy on the AH or the Blizz store any pet I can find.

Today Blizzard dropped a bombshell on the pet store. Not only can you buy the now Lil'XT for $10. You can also buy the super cool awesome OMGWTFBBQ Celestial Steed.

So I took a casual look at the WoW.com comments, and the official Blizzard forums. There is a ton of uproar again about how these "micro transactions" (I use quotes because really come on! $10 or $25 is not a micro transaction, it is a full fledged transaction) is going to destroy WoW. Althought there is a new part to the arguement.

The general complaint now says "Blizzard is selling useful items for real money" WoW is once again ruined. Next up is legendary weapons and armor. I guess it depends on your definition of "useful items" I guess that a mount is more useful than a non-combat pet, but it is not something you cant acquire with minimal effort. To use the Celestial steed all you need is to be level 20, with basic riding skill. Of course all you get is basic riding speed, and no flying. I still fail to see how this is game breaking.

The second most common argument is "Whah! Everyone with $25 in their wallet will have this super cool and unique mount! If everyone has it it is no longer unique to top end raiders who get lucky and win a roll or DKP bid for a 2% drop rate mount, or highly skilled PvP'ers and lets face it I am neither of those, and I will never be. I cant seem to figure out arena play for some reason, regardless of the toon I have tried it on, from hunter, to resto shaman to warrior, to mage. My Arena experience has pretty much involved the match starting, and seconds later I'm a puddle on the ground while my partner says "WTF? Why didn't you do X?"

Well to the people making the second argument I have bad news for you. Regardless of what your mommies tell you, you are not a special little snow flake. You do not deserve special treatment, and I'm sorry you are just like everyone else.

I personally am fairly glad that Blizz made this mount available to anybody with $25 in their wallet. I really thought it would be a reward for something ridiculously difficult like "Defeat Alganon the Observer 25 hard mode with only 15 people, with no warriors, paladins or rogues in the raid and no raid member wearing any gear with an iLevel greater than 187."

I'm about to go home for my lunch break (I know how awesome is it that I can go home for my lunch break?) and if the que to buy the mount is less than 60000 I will be buying mine and trying it out. When you think about it...is $25 really that much for a unique mount that you will have on all current characters as well as all future characters on any server you play in the future? I don't think so.

Happy Birthday!

So today marks the 1st birthday of Sham-Wows!
Coming soon, my first forays into ICC since the second wing opened.