[Personal] Computer-less

Currently my personal computer needs are met by a battered and worn ASUS EeePC. Well actually they're not, but I don't have anything else.

I had been in the process of buying the parts for a new PC, but then had to place that order on hold due to certain delays: furniture not in the flat, grandmother died, busy with work, that sort of thing. When I contacted the retail store today I got this message.

"We all sold out the CPU AMD 6000 since the order over 3days"

Sucks. And they won't restock for another 2-3 weeks, if not longer.

So the question is: go with some CPU inferior to the AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ 2000MHz HyperTransport AM2 64Bit? Or wait for them to restock and kick my flatmate off his Mac long enough to do dailies (or just give up on WoW for a while)? Or get the part somewhere else...

Moving Out, AKA Almost Completely Useless Post

For the second time in my life I am moving house.
The first time occured when I was 5, and involved crossing 11 time zones and both tropics.
This time it's a move of about 20km into town, but leaving the parental supervision unit behind.

So there's been lots of things to get organised; and since I haven't spent a lot of time in-game there hasn't been much material for wow-related posts.

There has, however, been lots of stuff to organise. E.g. last night I spent about four hours working on a forecasting budget, having entered one of my pedantic, nit-picky and perfectionist (i.e. German) moods. Therefore I found out that the New Zealand tax rates have changed, I have no idea how long ago.
Previously I was working on the basis of 19.5% tax in the lowest bracket, but this was clearly at odds with my payslips.
The new brackets are:
$0-$14000: taxed at 13.9%
$14001-$40000: taxed at 22.4%
Which actually leaves me with a bit of extra money. I still end up $1200 short at the end of the year (assuming predictions, prices, and job stability are accurate, which is assuming a bit much), but there's a pay review next week, so there's hope of not ending up horribly in debt by the end of the year. Except for the roughly $40,000NZD that I owe to the government for my tertiary education.

And there are lists to be written, projections to be made. Must organise content insurance etc. All of which is pretty mundane crap that doesn't interest anyone except me (I want to get my stuff insured) and the insurance agents (who will be able to make some nice profit out of me).



Actually, this post really IS a waste of space. So let me share with you a short story from my recent endeavours into the World of Warcraft.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is a story that clearly demonstrates the sheer quantity of stupidity that can be found in the game sometimes. What makes this story different from my other rants about in-game idiocy? Well, the difference is minor. Let's just get to the story, it's a short one.

The Characters:
D~: some random Aman'Thul Hordie
Ephylia: the paladin main of some little-known run-of-the-mill blogger. That would be me.

The Setting:
Doesn't really matter because this story is about a conversation.

Background Detail:
My mage alt had just reached 50 a few minutes ago, and was preparing to grind Enchanting and Tailoring en masse to 350 or so.

Scene One of Two:
[Trade] D~: WTS lots of Netherweave Cloth
*Thinking: Netherweave Cloth would be great for leveling tailoring, and I could then DE stuff to level enchanting*
Ephy to D~: Sure. I'll buy them. How much? And how many have you got?
D~ to Ephy: I have 21 stacks, looking at 3g each.
*Honest quote of my thought process: 21 stacks. Hmmm, so that's like 20 cloth per stack or something. How much gold do I have? 321. Hmmm. If I offer 300 gold I can get a free stack*
Ephy to D~: I'll take em for 300g.
D~ to Ephy: 300g?
*Trying to think again: hmmm. Have I offended him? Let's redo that calculation. Oh gods, I only offered half of what he wants. Well, let's pretend I'm not an idiot and say this as if it's what I meant all along*
Ephy to D~: I meant, I'll buy 300g worth.
D~ to Ephy: huh? There's 21 stacks.
*Huh?*
*Oh*
*Sh!t*
*holysh!twtfwasithinkingican'tbelieveididthisanddeargodit'slatei'mtirednowondermythoughtsaremessedupandWhatTheF*ckWasIThinking???*
Ephy to D~: Oh
Ephy to D~: Sh!t
Ephy to D~: I'm stupid. 63 gold it is.
D~ to Ephy: lol.
D~ to Ephy: I'll COD it.
Ephy to D~: Ok. Sorry about that. It's late.
*Exit Ephylia for bed*

Scene Two of Two: By a Mailbox in Dalaran. The next day.
*Yay. Mail. Must be that Netherweave Cloth. Ohgodsthatwasembarassingquickthinkofsomethingelse.*
*Opens mail item one: 11 stacks of Netherweave Cloth for a 33 gold CoD*
*Opens mail item two: 10 stacks of Netherweave Cloth with 30 gold attached*
*LOL*
*Sends D~ 60 gold*

Three things I'd like to add:
Hopefully I'm going to be starting a BSc (hons) in Applied Mathematics later this year. Wish me luck, because I'm really going to need it.
Scene One above took place at 3 o'clock in the morning. Closer to 4 o'clock in fact. I stop thinking after 2 (yes, I know, the fact that I stopped thinking is really obvious). I have no f*cking idea how I ended up with those numbers.
I'd have done this as a me-vs-brain type post or something, except that would have been really unoriginal, stupidly so and since it's not yet 2am I realise this. Also, quite evidently, no brains were involved on my end of the dialogue.

So there you have it.

WoW is contains a lot of stupid people, or at least a lot of really dumb-foundingly stupid behaviour.

PS: if it hadn't been so god-damn late, I'd have taken a screenshot. See above for note on not-thinking.

3.0.8 and me

Well, after cleaning work earlier this week (carpet was still a touch moist) I finally got in a quick WoW-fix last night, downloaded the patch and did some groupy stuff.

So what did 3.0.8 mean for me?

Ephylia is now under 1600 spellpower thanks to the Titansteel Guardian adjustment (i.e. nerf).
And I'm disappointed that Flow of Knowledge give 84 Resilience (was originally spoiled as having 84 crit rating, which made it stupidly good for 25 Wintergrasp marks). But otherwise my Paladin is loving the patch simply for the improvement to Glyph of Holy Light (which is so OP it's getting nerfed, fast). Now I just wish Holy-oriented Plate would start dropping.

My hunter is now a 6/52/5 Marksman (for leveling), which is a really cool spec. Brief testing on Target Dummies showed that I went from a 650-450 Hunter-pet split dps-wise, to 1050-150, which is a decent jump, but does mean I have serious issues with aggro now, maybe get a better pet than the Gorilla? But if both components of Chimera Shot crit, that's a nice 5.5k damage.
Also, apparently Survival post-patch is better than BM pre-patch. Wtf?

My druid is back to Feral, enjoying a nice increase to armor thanks to the changes to Survival of the Fittest. And he can finally use the Sonic Spear I picked up last year sometime (mentioned in this post). Which warranted a respec to a 0/52/9 build. Just because. Seriously, druid with Sonic Spear, my hunter is still silently weeping over that.

Oh yeah, evidence (thanks to Arianwyn, whose computer I hi-jacked, Mew =^..^= ):

It's got a spear! It must be a Hunter.

Lolwhut?!?!?!

/Salute

Ok, Where's the furniture?

So I came home today after wringing out my brains at work (my role within the project keeps expanding) hoping that after shopping for dinner, cooking dinner, eating dinner, cleaning up after dinner (etc) I could go beat up some target dummies in Org, respec for Chimera Shot, then beat up said target dummies some more, and maybe gain another level (or at least part thereof).
Fat chance.
Come home, wonder why furniture has all been moved. Oh right, you're steam-cleaning the carpet. Come to think of it, this was mentioned about twice a day for the last week, but y'know, I've been stressed. Fine, clean the carpet, clean the furniture too, it does need it, but. Wait. Oh no. You cleaned in the office didn't you? Now the room smells of nasty chemicals (*cough*, *splutter*), the carpet is soaked and there isn't actually room to use the computer. Sigh.
Oh well, maybe tomorrow, since it looks like I'm not moving out this week after all.

Two days without WoW... I'm going to start getting withdrawal symptoms.

My Professions: A Conundrum

I've been thinking a bit about the professions I've chosen, for my various toons, and come to the conclusion that somewhere along the way I may have made some bad calls.

My totally awesome level 80 paladin is a Jewelcrafter, which is my favourite profession (decent to stupendous profit margins, and really great for customising gear). This I am happy with. Awesome BOP gems and trinkets, and I can collect and customise spec/purpose-specific stuff for all my different roles, so that's nifty too. Damn but I love JC, it's been maxed for a month or so now and will stay that way. That being said, Paladin JCs seem to be pretty ubiquitous: out of the 4 level 80 paladins in my guild/on my friends list, 3 are JCs.

My almost-neglected first-to-70 hunter, whom I dusted off last week and got up to 72 is a Leatherworker. Which is fine and dandy, except I'm not overly excited about Bracer enchants and cheap BOP leg enchants, and can easily get everything I want by sending the mats to Toresh, my personal LWing bi-atch (well if you're not going to blog then you've got to have something to do, might as well make me some pretty stuff). So I'm not entirely sure if it's worth leveling LWing. Initially, while leveling as my first toon, being able to make my gear as I leveled was totally awesome (although admittedly I did kind of stockpile my skinning mats and then burst-leveled LW, making a whole bunch of gear 20 levels too low in the process), but since my current gear won't be replaced frequently (probably not until the PvP blues at 78, and then again with crafted epics at 80)

My druid is Engineering. I have very little idea of how this happened, but he's got 2 sets of BC goggles, which cost me quite a bit to get. Unlike some people I'm not really a big fan of engineering, I tend to always forget about the little gadgets. Of course the portable mailbox, repair bot and vendor will be nice, but one big thing that Engineers can make that is pretty much wasted on druids is ammunition, which would make the profession much better suited to say, a hunter. I could just send the ammo over, but this could lead to certain conflicts of times when mailboxes (for the LWing hunter) aren't handy, and there's the fact that the hunter will probably be well ahead on the leveling curve. And it lacks a certain... elegance ("I'm a nature-loving druid who turns into a bear, my raison d'etre is to provide ammo for my hunter to pew-pew stuff, mostly animals").
Additionally, giving my love of different roles and specs, my druid would benefit a lot more from the ease-of-customisation offered by the bracer and leg enchants available to a LW. And there don't appear to be any Feral engineering goggles in WotLK (or so I hear). Hmmm...

My Death Knight has picked up Inscription, which is a neat profession, even if most of the glyphs are just filling up my bank. Will probably be very useful to support Ephylia's frequent respecs (atm I'm just sticking with my Holy PvP glyphs) and the shoulder enchants will save me grinding Sons of Hodir on yet another toon (I'm currently too lazy to grind it on my main, using PvP Inscriptions instead, since Ephy is too young to have access to the BC stuff).
But one thing I didn't realise that Scribes had access to is the enchantment-specific off-hand. Now a DK isn't really the type to walk around with a puny off-hand, not when she could be wielding a bad-ass zweihander or another axe. And out of all my high-level characters the one who would actually benefit from these offhands would be my (mostly) Restoration/Balance druid. And a DK engineer would look pretty spiffy with some goggles.

And then there's options of just going all out gathering. Since most of the good crafted stuff is now BOE, and equipping fresh 80s, while supporting their enchants, gems and respecs can be quite expensive, this might be a good option. But who would be the best double-gatherer? The Hunter has a pet to fend off random mobs near nodes, as does the DK (if Unholy). The druid has flightform, which is great for quickly jumping between nodes that are close together and getting the edge on other farmers. The paladin has Crusader Aura, but I've already said that she's staying as JC.

So ideally I guess my hunter would be an engineer, my druid would have inscription and the DK be a double gatherer (farming leather to support the crafted gear for hunter/druid). But would I be willing to go through the time, effort and expenditure of leveling these a second time? And would I be willing to also drop and level up the relevant gathering professions (an extremely tedious process, except for skinning). Probably not. If Blizzard gave me the opportunity to swap around professions for dollars I'd actually take them up on it (within reason).
Hmmm...
I guess that I'll just keep gathering and stockpiling mats until I level my current professions out of boredom and for the sake of completeness.

Have you guys got any advice to give me? How are your own professions going, are you happy with the choices you made?

I know my readers are an extremely quiet lot, even my guildies, but c'mon, break down those communication blocks and comment or something.


(Yes, it's a long, quiet, boring day at work, but then most of this was written at home ;)).