Windows 7 upgrade rant.

I started out building my current computer with pretty up-to-date hardware, and originally ran Vista Business SP1 on it. By the time Windows 7 RC1 came out, I had upgraded to Vista SP2 and was still sick of Vista’s aggravating idiosyncrasies, so I decided to move to the Windows 7 RC, which ended up being a good idea. The upgrade was seamless, and although I was still on a 32-bit OS and therefore couldn’t make full use of my RAM, I was still able to run Vent, a media player, over 30 webpage tabs in Google Chrome, and WoW all at the same time with no performance loss in-game (always 60+ FPS, even in places like Dalaran). I was really happy with my OS, and was looking forward to the October 22nd official release. Everything was going great.

October 22nd rolled around, and I had already preordered my copy of Windows 7 Ultimate. Downloaded it, everything went great – until when I tried to upgrade, I was told “Windows 7 does not support an upgrade from your current OS”. That’s right – I could not upgrade the RELEASE CANDIDATE of their operating system to the official release version. I ended up having to blow another $300 on a full copy of Windows 7, and am not particularly enamoured with the handling of this upgrade process. One would think Microsoft would want to make things easier for RC1 users as they helped with pre-release bug testing and so forth, but no – instead, I was stuck buying the entire full version because I was never told to keep a partition with Vista around so I could upgrade to the release Win 7.

Oh well, I guess – I shouldn’t have expected any more from Microsoft. Getting screwed to the tune of $300 isn’t my idea of fun. That aside, Win 7 is indeed a great OS, even better on release. Very impressed with how well it runs everything – even better than RC1 did, which is saying something.

Mage speculation in 3.3

I noticed a few changes to Frost in 3.3, mainly the glyph that allows your Water Elemental to become permanent. I’m *hoping* this means Frost will be viable in 3.3, but we’ll see. It seems like it could be a lot of fun to try, but it doesn’t solve the problem of a very monotonous spell rotation. If they can fix that, I have a feeling that Frost could be a lot of fun in future raiding, especially since there’s that 1% of health every so often taken as damage debuff in Icecrown, at least on the PTR.

Another cool change that I noticed was the Ferocious Inspiration being spread out to Arcane mages – this gives mages another reason to go Arcane, in that it gives the raid a nice 3% damage buff. I foresee this being a pretty big deal in T10 content, especially since it looks like Beast Mastery hunters still aren’t gonna be really great DPS.

Lastly, the long-awaited Scorch change – finally, fire mages can do the same thing that locks can do, and apply their entire Scorch stack in one cast, unglyphed – meaning that any mages that still were using Scorch glyph for the raid can reglyph to something with a true DPS boost. What with Arcane’s 3% raid damage, Fire’s crit buff, and Frost’s replenishment, we may be seeing multiple specs of mages being useful in raids in 3.3, which would be very, very cool.

Friends online and off – why they’re less different than people think

I must admit, this post was kind of off-the-cuff for me; the idea popped into my head and I happened to be working on some other site-related stuff at the time.

I met the best friend that I will ever have about 12 years ago, back in first grade. He and I have stuck it out through thick and thin, and have pretty much always been there for each other for advice, support, anything really. For all the years we lived in the same city, we pretty much did stuff together all the time, worked at the same location for a good while, hung out very often, just in general were together a lot of the time – and even now that we’re in totally different states, we’re keeping in touch through phone calls, texts, pretty much everything – and already planning stuff for when we’re both back in our hometown this winter. We never get in any major disagreements despite being almost character foils for one another, and we’ve experienced a lot of major stuff in our lives together. I honestly think we’ll always keep in touch right up to our deathbeds; we’re literally that good of friends.

To contrast, I’ve met a lot of really cool people through WoW. My friends list has to be cycled through 3 different characters because I’ve met so many people that I genuinely like. A few of them, I was fortunate enough to meet up with at BlizzCon. Many people that I know, I talk to regularly via whispers, Ventrilo, even Facebook in some cases, many different media really. We do stuff together – raids, instances, or sometimes just chatting or leveling alts – and we have a lot of fun doing it. Even just yesterday, a bunch of us did some Outland instances on alts, just going through them and tearing it up. Good times. A lot of these people I’ve known for only about a year, some maybe as far back as a year and a half or two years (gaah, can’t even remember anymore – I’ll have to check blog archives sometime) – and we’re genuinely friends. It’s amazing, really.

Think about the two examples above. Even though I haven’t met a lot of my WoW friends face-to-face, we still do stuff together on a semi-daily basis, and even though people move on or stop playing, we still keep in touch. I’m still good friends with a lot of people from my old guild as well as with some people who used to be in Cloudy Day that have quit or moved on to another game. Now, I’m not saying that I’m ever going to be as good friends with the people that I’ve met over WoW as I am with my best friend (don’t think anyone will ever come close to that), but it’s possible to draw some serious lines of similarity here. Even when WoW dies, I hope to be able to keep in touch with a lot of the people I’ve met – and to that end, I’ll probably maintain the current guild Ventrilo for quite some time after WoW finishes up, or even past the next MMO, if we decide to move to another one. Maybe it’s just that I’m much more of an extrovert over the Internet, but I’ve formed genuine bonds with these people, and I’d hate to see them broken.

It’s a bit late for me here, so I’m going to cut this post a bit short – hopefully I’m not tired to the point where this entire post made no sense. I really didn’t intend for it to prove anything, more just as food for thought. I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s still easy to form real friendships over WoW, maybe not to the extent/depth of those you can find in real life, but enough to a point where they’re easily recognized as true friendships.

More alts!

I’ve been very productive with my two major characters recently; my paladin continues to do extremely well tanking, and I’ve also been playing my mage a bit as well. I finally finished my “Classic Raider” achievement when I got into an AQ40 run for the last 3 bosses; that put me up to 6035 achievement points on that character. That aside, I’ve been spending time leveling up some alts as well; my DK’s still at 72, but I’ve gotten my hunter up to 60, and hoping to get up to 70 by next month. Honestly, leveling a hunter is probably the easiest thing I’ve ever done; it makes me wonder why I hadn’t done it before.

In other news, Spice and Wolf’s first season comes out on DVD in US region this December! I’m pretty excited about getting that; it’s a great anime. Definitely worth a watch if you haven’t seen it yet; Season 2 just finished, so now’s as good a time as any to start watching it.

What I’ve been doing

…and why there have been very few posts recently…

Well, first off, as some of you may be aware, I’m back in college, so that’s cut back significantly on my free time. That said, I’ve still found time for gaming; Cloudy Day killed Anub’arak 25, and we’re making progress on Yogg 25 now too. Hardmode 10 Ulduar hasn’t gone as well as I would like, though, largely due to not being able to find healers. Oh well.

I’m still playing a lot on my paladin, enjoying that immensely – although I did hop on my mage last week and pull 6k dps on Koralon. Always fun to still be able to top charts on an undergeared character. The 4-piece set bonus for T9 Prot Paladins is awesome – 30 seconds off Shield Wall cooldown really helps on some fights.

I’ve been trying out some other games, too – most notably Aion and Champions Online. Aion, to me, feels a lot like a very graphically pretty WoW clone, and in addition feels a bit too grindy for my tastes. (Killing mobs at or around my level yields more experience per hour than questing – no motivation to give myself a sense of direction in the game). I know it was touted by many as the next “WoW killer”, but aside from a WoW killer being impossible to make, Aion really kind of disappointed me. I’ll play until I can get to Abyss on my own character, but I doubt I’ll renew that subscription. Champions Online, on the other hand, is a BLAST. Absolutely love that game. It’s an MMO, but abilities have no cooldowns, so it kind of feels like an action game too. Really well-done game, I’m enjoying it immensely.

Remember my BlizzCon “Part 1″? Well, the reason Part 2 never came out is that I lost my notebook that had all my BlizzCon stuff in it. I’ve found it again so I’ll be posting a horribly late “BlizzCon Part 2″ sometime.