Project Shade

Out of Gas

Todd — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 16:33:42 +0000

I went back to class today for the first time in probably four months. Yes I know; I’m a slacker. The school has moved to a new location with a much larger and nice building here in North Augusta. It’s within ten minutes of the house. I really have no excuse not to go now. Aside from the fact I’m lazy, which is a sad one.
Saturdays are open mat, which means you come and practice whatever you and your partner decide on. I just wanted to roll to try and build my endurance back up to the pitiful form it was in four months ago. Everything went pretty much how I expected it to. I’m stronger, it didn’t do me a whole lot of good, my endurance sucks again, which also didn’t do me a whole lot of good, and I’ve forgotten a lot of what I had learned, which really didn’t do me any good. The highlight of the day for me was making a grown man squeel when I broke his guard open by digging my elbows into his legs. I squeeled about two minutes later from his triangle choke so it all works out. All in all it was a good day, I just hate how bad my endurance has gotten. When I left they were still going at it, I was just totally out of gas trying not to hurl. Man it’s good to be back!

Making Strides

Todd — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 14:10:55 +0000

After several weeks of having Leo The Blind whoop up on us we’ve spent the last two weeks one shotting him. Did we suddenly acquire better gear or bring in some super T6 DPS to make him trivial? Nope. For the most part it came down to the DPS deciding to listen to the screams over vent to stop DPS as he comes out of whirlwind. Our healers are top notch, our tanks fear nothing and our DPS rocks the house. Anytime we fail at something it’s due to execution. The past few weeks we’ve been executing nicely.
This week I was up to tank again and while it wasn’t as smooth as last week, the loser still went down in a heap, we collected phat lewtz and rolled on for our first attempt at Mogorim Tidewalker. By the way, I’m pretty sure God kills a kitten everytime I tank SSC or ZA in my blue shoulders. It’s just not right! Ok back to Tidewalker. On the way over we encounter our first pack of Murlocs, Massiker goes over what needs to happen, we break the huddle and I run ahead with the holy frisbee pull. Insta-gib! I have 16k health, 17k armor and exceed the defense cap at 503 defense(Yes I’m uncrushable also). What in the world could have caused that?!? Oh..none of the healers ran up with me, silly healers. Battle rez, I jump back in and all goes smoothly from there on out with murloc packs.
With the room clear we begin sneaking to the back, praying that the 50 foot bubble farting giant doesn’t notice anyone. Of course he does see someone, he always will. Luckily it was only one of our Gnome Warlocks. He got smushed, rezzed, and we were on our way. Long strat talk, we do our best to digest it all and away we go. Wipe and quick like. Ut oh, this is looking like our first few weeks of Leo. We have some minor discussion, cleared up a few things and head back in. Pure pwnage, we took him down with maybe two deaths. Once again TB executes and a boss falls. This puts us at 3/6 in SSC. We’ve got VR down in TK with us heading to Solarian next week to try our hand at her. Spirits are high right now, raid turn out is good and as long as we keep executing I don’t see us slowing down anytime soon. Great job TB!

Hunter Consumables

Todd — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 01:24:09 +0000

Here is a small guide I put together for our guild hunters.

You should always be using consumables to increase your DPS as a hunter. Then why list the +stam/+mp5 items? Because dead hunters or OOM hunters aren’t providing thier max DPS. Asses your situation, use the consumable that will work the best for you, but use your upgrades to push you toward being able to use the max DPS items.
I also list different items being max DPS for BM/Surv than I do MM. The reason is BM/Surv spec hunters benefit greatly from Agility. Whereas the MM hunter prefers AP. Another thing is Agility scales with Blessing of Kings, where AP does not.

Battle Elixirs

• Elixir of Mastery +15 all Stats - Good all around elixir
• Elixir of Major Agility +35 Agility and +20 Critical Strike - Your max DPS elixir as BM or Survival.
• Fel Strength Elixir + 90 Attack power and -10 Stamina - Your max DPS elixir as MM.
• Elixir of Demonslaying +265 Attack Power against demons 5 minute Duration - Illhoof who?

Guardian Elixirs

• Elixir of Draenic Wisdom +30 Intellect and +30 Spirit - Good if you’re looking to raise your mana pool and MP5
• Elixir of Major Mageblood +16 MP5 - Most +MP5 from an elixir
• Elixir of Major Fortitude +250 Maximum Health and +10 Health Regen - Weak option if you’re total health is low. Only use long enough to get more +stam gear/gems/enchants

Flasks

• Flask of Relentless Assault +120 Attack Power - Max DPS
• Flask of Fortification +500 Health and +10 Defense - I only list this for completion. If you’re needing this to stay alive something is going wrong. Getting more +stam gear is the better option.
• Flask of Distilled Wisdom +65 Intellect - Huge mana pool increase with a decent increase to MP5 when Viper is active.
• Flask of Mighty Restoration +25 MP5 - Huge MP5 increase
• Flask of Chromatic Wonder +35 All Resistances and +18 All Stats - Awesome all around Flask, don’t underestimate the +35 resistance in zones where raid wide damage occurs.

Foods

• Blackened Sporefish +20 Stamina and +8 MP5
• Buzzard Bites +20 Stamina and +20 Spirit
• Clam Bar +20 Stamina and +20 Spirit
• Essence Mango +20 Stamina and +20 Spirit
• Fisherman’s Feast +30 Stamina and +20 Spirit
• Spicy Crawdad +30 Stamina and +20 Spirit
• Grilled Mudfish +20 Agility and +20 Spirit - BM/Surv spec DPS option
• Warp Burger +20 Agility and +20 Spirit - DPS option again
• Ravager Dog +40 Attack Power and +20 Spirit - MM Option

Pet Foods

• Kibler’s Bits +20 Strength and +20 Spirit for 30 minutes - Max DPS
• Sporeling Snack +20 Stamina and +20 Spirit for 30 minutes - I call it the Shade of Aran snack…that dude hates my cat.

Weapon Coatings

• Superior Mana Oil +14MP5

Best Kept Secret

• Fel Mana Potion +3000 mana over 24 seconds. Where a Super Mana Potion can give as little as 1700 or as much as 3000, this potion always gives the full amount. With the mana being returned over time you can take it far earlier than a Super Mana Potion without worry of wasting any thus freeing up the Potion cooldown more toward the end of the fight when you’re likely to need it most. This Potion does have a debuff that reduces damage and healing done by magical spells and effects by 25 for 15 min. This debuff does not matter to hunters.

I’m back!

Todd — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 21:47:56 +0000

That was an awesome time people. So much to do in Vegas and I crammed as much in as I could. Maybe to much. We got back in town Tuesday night. Thursday morning I wake up with the feeling that someone was sitting in my chest and a tingly left arm…ack! We all know what those are syptoms of! With heart problems running in my family I decided to goto the emergency room. Thankfully they said it wasn’t a heart attack, but they don’t know what it was either. I’ll take the no heart attack as a win though!

Happy Vegas Eve!

Todd — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 20:56:18 +0000

Happy Vegas Eve everyone! Vegas Day is tomorrow… woot woot! This time tomorrow I’ll be stumbling off of a plane and…well I can’t talk about that now can I…you know the creed.

Best Use Of The Ukulele Evah!

Todd — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 17:19:40 +0000

Seriously, Tiny Tim needs to sit down and take some notes.

Stylish Brick?

Todd — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 12:33:56 +0000

Recently I had been having a fair about of trouble out of Vista Ultimate 64 and decided to go back to XP Professional 64. I saw immediate returns by doing so. First and foremost is the fact that XP uses far less ram than Vista does to load up and run in the background. For me it was about half, as Vista would use 35% of my ram where as XP only takes 17% and I’m running 4gigs so that’s a pretty substantial savings.
So everything is happy and good as we start loading everything back on. Well right up until Itunes it was. They saw fit to support every version of Windows known to man, except mine. Even after forcing it to install there was no recognition of my Ipod. Awesome, I now own the worlds most stylish brick. To bad it’s not heavy enough to hurt anyone or I’d lob it at Steve Jobs head.

Edit: After a bit of research I found that Winamp does see my Ipod on this OS. I’m not sure how I’ll get the updates now but I bet someone has it figured out already. I just need to find it.

Got a haircut

Todd — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 12:04:08 +0000

Ever gone past your normal timeframe for getting a haircut? Nothing feels right, anytime you walk by a mirror you notice you need one, it won’t comb right..basically it sucks. Then when you do get it everything seems right with the world again. Well everything is feeling right in my world again. It will all come crashing down again as work starts tomorrow, but let’s enjoy today shall we?

I’ll get a picture up as soon as I learn to resize it within Wordpress. Right now they’re huge and display more Todd than I think most people handle, much less want.

Who Let The Dogs Out

Todd — Fri, 02 May 2008 18:43:43 +0000

Man what a month April was for me and my house. With all the activities around the house and with family I wound up taking a few vacation days. Actually..I took quite a few. So many so that I only worked six days total. Incredibly fun while it lasted and sucking incredibly now that it’s over. Apparently sitting at your desk playing WoW all day for a couple weeks doesnt translate well to being on your feet for 13 hours in a production enviroment. My feet hurt, bad. The dogs are barking, and it’s not a sissy toy dog, yipe yipe yipe. We’re talking big dawg, rumble the earth type barking. Remember The Sandlot? Yeah that type of barking. Don’t worry I’ll be ok.

My wife woke up this morning to fix breakfast and during small talk mentioned “hey you guys head to Vegas next month right?”. *blink* Great day..it is next month..I wish she hadn’t mentioned it so early. I’ll never get it out of my head now. One month…Woohoo!

It’s good to be back

Todd — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 22:08:01 +0000

I’m beginning to really dislike my webhost. They instigated a move to a new hosting platform in December and this month is when my site finally finished the transition. It’s hard to call it finished really as I’ve had nothing but problems during it and even yet still. Internal server errors keep popping up, I can’t get Andrea’s site to install properly and everything seems slower to me overall. I’ve sent in a support ticket with all the issues I’m having so hopefully everything will be back to normal soon. Today is the first day I’ve been able to log in and post in a week now. /sigh Sorry Andrea, your site is next I promise.