Gitr

Calling All Gitr Readers to Action

February 8, 2008 By Gitr 11 Comments

Hey everyone. I just got a note about a contest for the second annual SOBCon blogging conference in Chicago. I was an attender and technical assistant for the inaugural event last year. The downside for Gitr is that it’s dang expensive for a two-day event, because he’s got to get his keester from Tampa up to Chicago.

According to the contest rules and reward, the attendee sending the most hits to the SOBCon site through the 14th gets free registration and two night’s hotel stay for the conference, which includes an exciting small group workshop to improve our blogs for our readers. You’d all like to see this place get even better, right? I will once again be live blogging the event, so long as I get a new power cable for my laptop and it survives until then. There will be lots of photos, tips, and improvements. This year is billed to be better than last year.

I thought so. Just to make sure I’m not pulling your leg, here’s the link to the contest rules on Terry Starbucker’s site. He’s the co-founder of the event, along with Liz Strauss.

Thanks to the good folks at Plante Moran Financial Advisors for running this contest.

Raid Was a Bust; Members Fined With /gkick

February 6, 2008 By Gitr 15 Comments

Gitr went on the raid Friday night, but life has been too busy to report back. Now is a good time, but I don’t have time to get into all my details about dumping Alchemy and hitting 300 Engineering or getting up to 8k honor and having enough BG marks to get an epic when I get the honor it takes. You’ll have to come back for that. I just realized I didn’t send the screenshots to my Gmail account this morning, so this will be sans Kara screens. Sorry ’bout that.

I got to the raid an hour late due to commitments. My late arrival was planned upon, but not the pally and priest who just decided to not show up. Runnik spent the next hour getting those spots filled, and got a priest from another guild while they waited for me to OT because they were still down a healer and our Arms/Fury warrior apparently refuses to tank.

As I logged in, they cheered and then immediately boooed when the priest sent Runnik a /w and said she had to go raid with her guild. They were screaming at her. We tried to persuade her to stay and offered her a permanent spot on Team 2. I believe she is considering it for this week.

After another hour of searching, we finally got another healer who was both properly specc’d and not saved to another instance. Morons. For some reason, which (judging by the amount of cussing on Vent) infuriated the members of Team 1, there were always 2-3 people per pull that could not get it in their heads that you need to hug up against the spectral chargers to prevent the… Charge! Every friggin’ pull was a near-disaster. By the time we got to Attumen and I pulled Midnight for off-tanking, a charger… Charges! in and knocks me on my keester.

So there I am, tanking a boss and a 71 Elite at the same time. That is, until the heals didn’t come because the charger feared my healer. We spent another 45 minutes fighting our way back to Attumen and trying to slip in on a good time for the respawns, but the timing was never right. We never got all the way back before everyone was either totally broken or under 15% armor.

Our dps warrior declared the raid a bust to the raid and left. Then he told the guild in nice green letters that the raid was a bust and basically said that Team 2 sucked. Runnik and our MT had had enough. This was his last straw from a number of offenses, and they kicked him then and there, before we even got out of the instance. Within 30 minutes, our guildie healer was doing some talking and got herself kicked and banned from the forums. Yesterday when I logged in, I noticed our member count was down about 16 toons. I asked if there was an exodus or a mass-kicking. It was the latter.

The leadership had finally reached a boiling point with people being impatient with the second team, forgetting that they had progressed very slowly through Kara themselves. I heard stories of entire nights of wipes, but no one put them down. Now the Team 2 members are surrounded by a supportive group of people. Progress will probably be delayed a little, but it’s a much nicer environment now.

Blue Screens of Death

January 31, 2008 By Gitr 4 Comments

I keep getting a ton of those cursed IRQL_LESS_OR_EQUAL BSoDs recently on my new computer. I haven’t installed any new drivers, until this all started happening. It seems to be a Patch 2.3 thing. Even Flashing the BIOS didn’t do anything. I’ve got an nVidia 8600GT, ASUS motherboard with an nVidia NIC. So many variables involved.

I’ve messed with the tips about virtual memory, DEP, and physical memory dumps (I finally hard powered off after the counter hit 90). I found a thread at home about Blizzard addressing the issue with the lame tips above, but then I found this thread on the forums at school tonght:

How I did it for anyone that wants to know. I’m WinXP, go to start, Control Panel, Performance Maintenance (if you’re using category view) (System for Classic View) then Devise Manager, open up Display Adapters, click on your listed Nvidia card, and Rollback the Driver.

Have you had this problem? How did you fix it?

Keyed for Karazhan

January 30, 2008 By Gitr 19 Comments

Last night saw Gitr through the super long, 18 wave fight in Black Morass with 3 guildies and an orphan Holy paladin in CoT. It was a trial by fire, and I didn’t even know it. I’d been getting along swimmingly with one of the veteran mages in the guild, Pandara, and he was more than happy to come along to get me keyed for Friday’s milestone walk into Kara.

It was a great time for me MTing the instance with such powerful dps in the ranks (Hunter, Mage, and dps Shammy) to rip aggro away from me. The most that happened most of the time, was an occassional turn to the shammy that I taunted right back, followed by a Revenge and a couple of sunders. Being a Fury/Prot spec definitely met me with some challenges, but most of them were my own dealing with how I had my spells on my toolbars. I need to re-arrange things tonight or tomorrow before the raid.

The thrills started when Pandara ripped aggro one time and the Rift Lord shot right for him and killed him. Today I found out that one time he rocked my world by accident… that time, he did it on purpose to see what I’d do. It was not until today that I became aware that Pandara is Bp’s alt. The significance there is that Bp is our MT for Kara Team 1 and Team 2… at least until I get geared for Team 2. After that, I have no idea what Runnik’s plan is, but Bp said I have no worries about Friday, even as an OT build, and that he’d be making me do a couple of pulls to get used to taking the reigns.

To recap yesterday, I got over 2k Honor, 4 BG marks, 30 Engineering points to 261, got the shoulders off of Aeonus (Pauldrons of the Crimson Flight), and got completely keyed for Karazhan. Boy did I sleep well.

Key Fragment #2: Check

January 24, 2008 By Gitr 4 Comments

I am remiss in not updating that I got key fragment #2 on Friday last week. To get back on track, here we go.

I was questing out in SMV trying to cross off as many off my log as possible when I got a whisper from a 70 mage asking me to a group to complete a quest and that he had a full group AND could summon me AND would pay me 10g. I said I would and I was summoned to the end of the path of Elites just West of the Blood Elf outpost.

I asked what to do to help them, and they said to tank my guts out. There are going to be 4 waves, and I needed to put my game face on… I think they looked at my gear and got worried. We wiped on the first attempt when the second wave let too many mobs free on the squishies, but I think they were targeting mobs I wasn’t tanking full-time. We made it on the second attempt, and the third, and the fourth. People kept coming in the area and I was like a tanking prostitute. I never did get the gold, but I will be able to rip through this when it’s my turn to go to Black Temple.

Soon after, I got to go on another PuG with Alaron to get the fragment from Steamvaults. That was a dang easy job, and we moved on to get the third fragment. Alaron had the key to get into Arc, so we were all set, or so I thought. Anyone guess my problem last Friday? Tempest Keep? Gitr?

Right! I couldn’t fly yet! I ran to the flight point, flew to Area 52, and then got summoned to the TK meeting stone to pick up that flight point. The next thing I knew, every busted out their flying mounts. It dawned on me at that moment that I had finally reached that instance I’d read about that required a flying mount to even get to. Yeah… suck bucket!

After facing some ridicule in green text that I didn’t appreciate much, I left the group and started killing warp hunters, feeling so miserable about the let down of not finishing the fragments that I logged for the night and went to bed.

Respec

Since the Kara Team 2 for Doom’s Assailants needs an OT, and everyone keeps saying I need to return to my ways of Fury, I respecc’d for the awesome deal of 15g last night. I didn’t really get a chance to try it out yet, because I went directly to an AB match… you can guess how that turned out.

Newly-minted 70s in BGs with a re-visited spec do not fare well with epic’d out warlords. I died 6 times and only got 35 honor kills and one Mark of Honor for our 2000/930 loss. It was pitiful. It took 12 of us to re-take the Stables… I don’t know what it is about Alliance and Horde in AB. I’ve played both, so I’m pretty sure most of them have. It just doesn’t make any sense at all that Alliance can’t get their act together.

Since I’m sure to get a lot of questions and feedback on my new spec, here it is for all to see, comment, and make fun of. I’m not a build shop master by any stretch of the imagination, so we’ll see how this goes when it counts.

I’m going to try to get into TK with a PuG tonight because it’s the second night in Kara for Team 1. Time to get some gear!

I Believe I Can Fly!

January 23, 2008 By Gitr 16 Comments

After dedicating myself to Netherstorm quests that involved killing humanoids for cash and good reward money, I was well on my way to a 200g night after only a couple of hours. I had 146g more in my bags than when I started and got 6 green drops to auction off when I saw a guildie ask if anyone wanted to do The Ring of Blood.

Did I!? Heck yeah, double gold at level 70 for 10 minutes of pure fun, count me in. We blew through them and had great healing from a random 67 pally in Nagrand who only got silenced once and made me pop a potion. I selected the 2H axe for 10g vendor trash and announced to the guild how glad I was to only be 200g from getting my flying mount.

The next thing I know, Pandara (70 uber mage) opened up a trade window and very slowly typed 2 0 0 in the money box. I asked him if he was sure because I wasn’t asking for assistance. He said to pay me back in time because I’ll be rolling on gold soon. I gladly accepted the gift and flew off to SMV to buy my biggest purchase ever: 800g of riding training and a Snowy Gryphon. I popped the video recorder on for the big event and will be putting it to some music. I flew around for a while and completed a couple of quests by dropping down onto locations and logged for the… morning.

Also, Growl put my ding 70 video to some music. Thanks man! Let me know if this plugin works, because I’m limited at work.

[quicktime]https://gitrknowswow.com/images/Ding70.mov[/quicktime]