Other shouts --

I found a nice blog the other day so if I may point other boomkin in the general direction of Gray Matter, I'm sure he'd appreciate the visits!

Also, on the Traumatic Shift front, I changed my mind and went for daggers instead on the vague and possibly unfounded idea that I'd be able to find more crit on a dagger than a mace. And also the fellow above seems to think the dagger from the Kirin Tor rep reward is pretty much one of the best pre-raiding one-handed weapons ever so that played a factor too. I got a nice off-hand to replace my AH junk yesterday by getting into a group for nexus and getting the Tome of ... something I don't remember the name of, off of Anomalus. Thanks to Telk, Sylene, Aldimere, and guildmate Xirlok for putting up with my anti-DK policy.

Strange but true story: had a conversation with Telk while I was looking for a group (difficult as a dps anyway, more so with said policy) which was actually fairly civil about why I refuse to group with DKs. So I noted that in an attempt to wrap up the conversation, something like "thank you for being so courteous, it's above the flak I usually get" and his response was all, "I guess you can be a bigest against dks...my is racist against trolls". Huwah? Reply to courtesy is to descend into calling me a bigot? Anyway I thought that was a write-off until Aldimere who was the leader of the group invited me in and look, there was Telk in the group. Weirdness. It almost makes me wonder if I could just shortcut the tiresome attempts of people to "convert" me to DKs by saying I'm a bigot. Hard to argue with that, right? The wife thinks otherwise, that it would intensify argument. I have not yet seen a good enough argument to convert me, the most cogent being "well so you're against warlocks too?". I think there's a fundamental difference between calling in demons from another plane and enslaving them to your will, and forcibly reanimating dead corpses and desecrating their post-death experience. Other people apparently would lump that in the same group. I split that on two reasons: one, I think there's a difference between enslaving an evil demon, and enslaving a good person. Fine line, yes, but wouldn't you feel better about making Hitler your personal slave and Mother Theresa, even if you hated slavery across the board? And two, from a practical standpoint I have to draw a line somewhere or I'd never be able to play. Excluding one class is tough but doable, even though it probably virtually excludes me from anything over a 5-man run, but excluding two would be impossible, I'd be reduced to solo play all the time. And that would suck as I've been making a slight priority shift in Ihra with the expansion so that I want him to have some good PvE gear as well as PvP gear. Prior to wrath, I walked around in a full set of PvP gear all the time with I think 2 rings and a set of bracers to switch out for PvE.

Also a shoutout to Carbonite, a lovely add-on. I downloaded it on the recommendation of some guildies who said it was better than Quest Helper, in order to power-level my mage Forol on my wife's server. I have been generally satisfied with it, even though the map supercedes Cartographer's and doesn't tell me instance levels anymore. But two days ago it came in amazingly handy. I was farming caribou meat in BT and I passed a 71 DK. In direct violation of my policy I allowed him to live because hey, he was 3 levels under me and I felt an odd stirring which was probably pity though I can't tell for certain. His response: to wait for 5-10 minutes until I was heavily engaged with two other mobs, and then jump me and kill me. I rezzed, and Carbonite via its interesting "friends list for gankers" told me where he was on the map, which was way far away and I'd've never found him by myself. I was able to hunt him down and murder him like a dog. For the record he was mounted and not engaged in any fighting at all so it was a much fairer fight than he gave me.

PvP notes on that fight: I again continue to hate how you have to kill unholy(? I think?) dks twice, first as themselves and then again as a ghoul. That's not cool, they're hard enough to kill anyway and then to give them an extra life adds to the unfairness. I'm still not sure what happened in dragonblight a few weeks ago where I had to kill a ganking DK three separate times before she died for good; wife came up with the theory that she had a soulstone on her maybe. I don't know but that needs some serious nerfing. Also I started the fight by rooting, which has generally been my answer to dk's having insane melee dps, stay as far away from that as possible. And he death-gripped me thus nullifying the roots. I understand that's on a 30-second cooldown so if i had to do that again I guess I would root, expect to be death-gripped, and shift to travel to get the distance back while my trees pounded on him.