Anyone that knows me knows that I’m slowly turning into a babbling idiot the closer that Kingdom Hearts : Birth by Sleep comes to launching in the US.

I’m a huge fan of the series, I’ve even posted about it previously, though that one was more of an embarrassing moment that happened to me as I was walking out of Walmart.

So this game comes out on Tuesday, and I’m giving serious consideration to throwing a wrench into my sleep schedule by sleeping early, waking up before midnight and grabbing a copy of the game to play as long as possible.

I’m also writing this post on Sunday so I don’t have to worry about it. I also need to do all my chores for the week on Monday, that’ll be interesting.

Theres a good chance I’ll be coming back to WoW after I beat this game as well, been doing art commissions for a friend which should pay for WoW for a little while.

Yay stuff to write about!

I feel like all I’ve been doing for the last few weeks is whine and complain.

I’ve gotten myself into a rut with it, but I’m going to try to cheer up.

Maybe.

Complaining can be really therapeutic for me.

But I’ve been doing too much of it latly.

I just repeated myself right there, honestly don’t have much to say, that isn’t much different than the last few weeks though.

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I have a lot of holes in my schedule where I don’t feel like messing around with any of the entertainment available to me, and I wish I had WoW again to fill in those spots, even grinding a new toon I rolled just for the hell of it for 15 minutes would be great.

Its just, none of them are in marketing.

Job searching is difficult when I can’t sell my skill set worth a darn, which really isn’t very large to begin with.

Blogging is slipping away from me, I’ve even forgotten I run this thing a few times, only to be reminded by its lingering presence in my bookmark folder when I went looking for something else.

I’ve been wanting to come back to WoW, but my bank account is quickly dwindling to nothing, and the new kingdom hearts game comes out in a week anyways.

Been playing a lot of kingdom hearts too, brushing up on my lore, and trying to recreate the save file that my brothers destroyed a few years ago on the second game. Just beat the game yesterday morning after starting completely over last week, its fun to go back to older games in a series, you find the little hooks the developers put in that didn’t make much sense at the time.

WTB Birth by Sleep

WTB a job.

thats like becoming my signature now…

Its been a little over a week since my game time ran out.

I think I have a few auctions I didn’t pick up because I thought I had till Tuesday and I ran out Saturday.

I miss my characters.

I don’t miss my paladin because he doesn’t count.

Is barkskin still in the Beta? Surv. Inst. got promoted to shield wall, but nothing has been said about barkskin in a really long time.

What will I do if it isn’t? Worse, what if its not usable in bear form again?

My blog will have a name that doesn’t make sense, oh I knew I should have named it something non-specific!

Why on earth did I name my blog Barkskin in the first place? Its a balance spell, I can probably count on my fingers and toes the number of times I’ve even cast moonkin form.

Really, I remember when the only time I would even use the spell would be to do an AoE pull in BC. Because you couldn’t even cast in in bearform, and its CD fit nicely in line with the CD on Hurricane.

I’ve been thinking about updating my website to reflect the update to bearform, and possibly my personal update to the shield-ier rage using class.

My domain name expires in April (I think), I’d want to wait till then to rename my blog.

I don’t have the program I used to make my original theme anymore either, Id have to dig it up out of whatever blackhole file server crash mess it fell into.

What would I rename to?

Something Tauren related?

Rage-something?

A pun about alts?

I dunno, back to my Vampire Agent Kajiit in Oblivion.

In the latest Beta build, Frenzied Regeneration was turned into Survival Instincts and Survival Instincts into an actual Shield Wall.

No word on whats going on with Barkskin, perhaps it will remain a weak reduction with a short CD ability similar to warriors Shield Block.

I’ll be glad to have a full strength Shield Wall, and Frenzied Regen wasn’t overly useful anyways, even when it was glyphed.

The glyph was the only thing that made the CD into anything remotely useful for groups and raids (the ability itself is really nice for soloing difficult things), and even then, I only found it really effective when combined with another CD, usually Surv. Inst. or when I did something stupid that I would have to be healed through, like standing in a firewall on Sarth (Sorry, couldn’t come up with a current example).

But that leads me to wonder if the glyph will stay, which would make it a really awesome CD, now that I think about it.

So they’ll probably change the glyph.

Still, I’ll be glad to have a strong damage reduction cooldown enough that I don’t mind loosing a weak healing CD in exchange.

Talk to yall when I have something to say, have a happy Lich King!

A few weeks ago, after much prodding by my boyfriend, I applied to Moosehead on my paladin.

I knew the raidleader/guild leader was kind of a jerk, not just because my boyfriend was raiding with him for the last few weeks, but because we used to be in a guild together.

On a side note, you may have wondered why I hate paladin rerollers. This is exactly the reason why.

Be warned, this story is full of tangents that are at least somewhat necessary to tell the full story.

Near the beginning of the ToC patch there was a resto shaman in Inconceivable. This resto shaman was pretty good, one of the top 3 healers in the guild, but this shaman had a chip on his shoulder.

You see he had a prot paladin alt, and he liked his prot paladin alt very very much. He loved his paladin so much that he wanted to change it to his main.

But the guild had about 4 or 5 tanks regularly online, and we were constantly short on healers. So this shaman couldn’t get his way.

This made the shaman very angry. Of course it didn’t help that our guild leader at time was the kind of guy you either loved or hated, and most people hated.

(So much so that there used to be several guilds that formed on the basis of hating him)

So the shaman decided he had had it with Inconceivable! He would go and make his own guild, and more over, he would start on a new server to get away from the scrubs of Crushridge.

Time passed and then one day, a short time before Malevolent stopped raiding, I see his warlock spamming trade chat, recruiting for the guild he had formed on the other server.

He had transfered back.

To get away from the scrubs on BlackWaterRaiders.

And his main was now his Shadow Priest.

Okay…

So then Malevolent stops raiding, and from dealing with him in the past I knew I didn’t want to be a part of them, and besides, they weren’t recruiting feral tanks, but they were recruiting ret paladins, so my boyfriend who i had been raiding with since Ulduar apps up and gets in.

Unable to get into a guild with any character I would actually like to play on, I went casual, while my boyfriend would pester me about joining on my holy paladin.

Of course I resisted for awhile, I was almost glad when revered exploded because I wouldn’t have to keep playing him anymore.

But the allure of a kingslayer was became overwhelming, so despite my better judgement I took my time and filled out a guild application.

I’m not one to toot my own horn, but my paladin would not be out of place in a hardcore guild.

Instead I had to defend my app with copy pastes from the Elitist Jerk forums, and not in the “do you really know what your talking about?” kind of questions you can expect from an app evaluation, and indeed I did expect to hear some as my talents are not 100% cookie cutter.

Instead I was being told blatantly wrong or out of date information as if it was the one and only way to play a Holy Paladin.

For example, I gem int, so I was informed that I needed a 51/5/15 spec in order to be competitive in hardmodes.

What? Maybe if I was still wearing blues, and illumination magically became un-nerfed, and Divine Sacrifice didn’t exist anymore, and if Sacered Shield was worthless, and we didn’t have a plethora of Ret paladins providing the Heart of the Crusader.

Thats kind of a lot of ifs, and not a single one of them are true, or likely to become true very soon or without any sort of forewarning.

This went on for two whole pages, ( most apps in this guild are lucky to get two responses), every time something else was ‘wrong’ with my paladin I had to get on my boyfriends account to defend myself, because they don’t allow apps to actually view or respond to their own app.

Eventually he gave up, and my paladin was invited to the guild.

Before the raid started I was informed via whisper that I was being allowed into the raid, and that he hoped for my sake, that I knew what I was doing.

I was just the slightest bit nervous for the first few fights. I hadn’t healed, or even really played my paladin at all since Revered blew up when the zone buff was at 10 or 15%, but now it was at 30.

I blew his socks off, and frankly, the other healers out of the water. I think I ended with 30% of the total healing & absorbs done for the night with 6 other healers in the raid.

I later found out that before he had invited me, he had told my boyfriend that he didn’t want me because I was applying on an alt, which made me “A jack of all trades, and master of none.”

From the guy that switched his mains at least twice since he left Crushridge a year ago? And was he saying I was no good on my druid as well?! Let alone the fact that I’ve seen almost all the content they were ‘progressing on’ with only half or a third of the current raid buff active! Grrr!! Indignation!

The next day was Ruby Sanctum, and it was a doozie.  No crowd control was used on the trash, and the tanks woudn’t use cooldowns.

We wiped.

Several times.

Tanks going from 100% to dead in .3 seconds.

And somehow it was allways my fault.

Apparently if only I used FLASH of light instead of holy light, we would have gotten through it.

Ok, fully buffed, the numbers go something like this :

Flash of light = 1.00 second cast, Holy light = 1.3 second cast.

Flash of light = ~1-2000 heal per cast, Holy light = ~20-40,000 heal per cast.

Which one do you think is more time/heal effective?

So anyways, it didn’t take long to get sick of that, everything can only be my fault to a certain degree, either CC something or don’t try to make one tank tank 8 guys with an AP buff on them, and it certainly didn’t help that I don’t really enjoy playing my paladin.

So, understandably, I dropped that like the bottom fell out, but I’m left with not much more than indifference at the game in general.

I fully plan to come back for Cataclysm, but due to what I’ve been through since the very start of this expansion, I’ve lot my faith in serious raiding, and yet, am not overly attracted to casual progression.

I think I need to take some time and do some cyber-soul searching, to figure out what I’m really about.

And job searching, I could really stand to have a job too.

She started as a character to talk to my friends on a different server, they quit the game and she ended up a seceret hide alt.

The massive amounts of unpleasantness, and even just flat out nerdrage, that I get in groups just for being a DK make ‘hiding’ on this character an exercise in frustration.

For example, I had a 80 mage, with nearly 5k gearscore in my normal occulus group before I reached 80 just screaming profanity at me after telling him to stop complaining when he and the only rezzer had died and the rezzer was running back. The part that struck me was when he said I couldn’t say anything to him untill I outdpsed him.

The sad part is that I actually was out damaging him because he would just sit around with his thumb up his butt for most fights.

Whatever, Bloodred is now 80, I picked up duelspec to try frost dps, but then realized I only had one one handed mace I picked up while leveling, and level 1 skill in that to boot.

I still don’t much care for how DKs play, when deathrunes are available the rotation seems spammy, when there are no deathrunes I feel like I have way too much downtime.

Yep, it got me.

Critical hit.

Pre-expansion boredom.

For the last month or so I’ve been logging on in the morning for a few hours, mostly on my super secret special awesome death knight, who’s 77 now, and the only character I’ve remembered to get the borrowed wyvern on before buying cold weather flying on, ever.

Sometimes I quest, more often than not, recently I queue for a random dungeon and alt tab, reading blog posts, watching hulu, and starting to get back into Manga for the first time in over 3 years.

After I do the dungeon, if it ever pops, I log off and don’t touch the game for the rest of the day. The queues on that battle group are so slow for dps at that level!

I tried to get back into raiding, with one last ditch effort I applied to a guild I knew I wouldn’t want to stay in, lead by a guy who I knew I didn’t agree with (I’m seriously going to have to get my app drama off my chest, maybe Thursday’s post…) on a character I knew I didn’t want to play. For what?

A kingslayer title. I wanted to kill Arthas so badly before the Cataclysm, it killed me to watch two guilds fall apart while working on him, as if all my effort was for nothing. Now that I have it, it feels cheesed, I rolled in there and two shot him with a new guild on my first day.

I don’t care enough about hardmodes anymore, and I don’t care enough about gear to want to keep putting up with the constant guild hopping I’ve endured this expansion. Always building my rep as a solid player, and my dkp, then everything either grinding to a halt, slowly fading, or instantly exploding in my face, leaving me scrambling to find a new raid slot in a new guild.

So I’m punching out, going on holiday, getting away from all the B.S. Maybe I’ll find a job.

Not sure what I’ll wright about, but I’ve been having a hard time coming up with content for awhile now, so maybe I’ll just go down to one post a week or something, not sure, I’ll figure it out, I really like having a place to put my thoughts and rants.

The fact that a couple people actually enjoy reading them is just icing on the cake.

Thanks guys.

I’ve been trying to pump a post out every tuesday and thursday, but I don’t actualy have one for today.

Ho hum.