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If you're looking for stuff about me and my journal click here. If it's techie stuff you're after click here or career stuff is here. Meanwhile, my world of warcraft news are here. Finally I have stories about my pets and my interest in T'ai chi. If you want to read the whole lot go here. The archives on the right will take you to my old stuff. Creative Commons Licensed

Archive for November 2006

moonkin trial in wow 2.0 public test realm

written by CraigBeattie on November 25th, 2006 @ 03:09 PM. edit (admin only)

Further toying around with patch 2.0.

Thought since the patch allows me to respec at no real cost to myself I’d give a full balance spec a chance. spec is: (forgot pic of top half – oops)

balance spec bottom half
Balance spec (bottom half)

As before there’s a video : Moonkin video . The audio in this version is a bit out of sync at the start but you get the idea.

Most interesting observations:
  • despite my noobism moonkin form has a very high survivability, not squishy like mages at all.
  • even with my meagre dps gear I was still getting some very nice damage output
  • being able to summon the treants to a point in the distance is an awesome aggro management tool
  • I was killing stuff very quickly with little mana related downtime issues

A few pics for you :

Treants summoned on top of a mob

The “summon your treants on top of the mob” pull.

Treants and star fire combo

Chucking in some starfires…

Treants finished their work

All good things come to an end!

Blog move again...

written by CraigBeattie on November 24th, 2006 @ 08:22 PM. edit (admin only)

So, blog(s) were originally on blogger, then I got hosting and moved them to wordpress and now here I am hosting my blog on mephisto!

Why move? Well, ruby on rails is cool and mephisto seems to have some nice features and such like. It’s given me an opportunity to play with the template some too and also to pop some of my del.icio.us tags on my blog – means that if you look down the right hand side bar you’ll see an up to date list of my latest del.icio.us’d things.

Why mess up my old links? Well, thats mildly irritating. The format of url differs a little from wordpress to mephisto. Most of the article links get through fine but the archives are different and some of the articles have a slightly different naming scheme (like wordpress removes ’.’ from titles but mephisto doesn’t).

Sorting stuff out then… So, now I’m left with the enviable task of fixing the old posts. Blogger uploaded images don’t work outside blogger so i’ll have to go back and fix them, and also I’d like to manage my wordpress content as mephisto assets too.

Enjoy reading …

Amazing what people do as hobbies...

written by admin on November 21st, 2006 @ 12:29 PM. edit (admin only)

TEEN GOES NUCLEAR: He creates fusion in his Oakland Township home

Seems the young lad is a keen physicist and was able to secure parts from old mammogram machines and such like. Makes my pass times look a little less impressive when you see this – creating fusion in your basement. Most amusing.

Excursions in the wow 2.0 test realms

written by admin on November 18th, 2006 @ 09:56 PM. edit (admin only)

You’re gonna have to know alot about warcraft to read the following :)

Patch 2.0 brings with it some significant changes, some of which should improve my ability to help heal in the guilds raids. I’ve been suggesting with my current very good healing gear I might heal 600 every 3 seconds for 12s with rejuvenation, rather alot of healing. The public test realms gave me a chance to test this out.

Job no. 1 – new spec. I popped 5 points in feral and the rest in the restoration tree as these two images show: Talent tree pt 1 Talent tree pt 2


Job 2. whats my healing like now? Lets look at the new tree form – tree of life: Tree of life first look Seems i’m immune to polymorph effects (go go nefarion encounter :D ) and I get a nice boost to my parties +healing abilities, from 856 to 944 (+88 in my current gear).


Next, I attacked something in tree form to look at what the bonus was like and what my rejuv ability healed for: Tree of life rejuvs for 573 omg! 573 heal off my rejuvenation ability. A respectable 290 from regrowth too – this is somewhat higher than the 466 off a rejuvenation in patch 1.12.x. Gonna make my job easier.

Video avalaible here. You’ll note despite keeping myself HoT’d my mana isn’t really dented during the fight. Also, due to the very low dps tree form is sooo not appropriate for soloing mobs!


Finally a quick look at my healing without being a tree! Rejuvenation in caster form for 547

Well that’s quite quite respectable too. Here I noticed that my mana consumption was significantly less in tree form too, but even so this bodes well for running around healing people very very effectively.

Tracks hosting....

written by admin on November 18th, 2006 @ 12:32 AM. edit (admin only)

aha – seems zenlist.com is going away! what will I do! oh noes…

well actually its pretty trivial to install tracks on dreamhost – nice little guide available here. So now I have a version of tracks running at http://tracks.craigbeattie.com/.

If you’re looking for a neat todo list thingie and need one thats hosted give me a shout and I might set u up with an id.

Edit – as per comment look here for the article ;)

Got a vid of a maexxna kill by dr

written by admin on November 16th, 2006 @ 12:53 AM. edit (admin only)

More than one way to tie a tie??

written by admin on November 9th, 2006 @ 02:21 PM. edit (admin only)

zenlist.com = 500 - Internal Server Error

written by admin on November 9th, 2006 @ 10:58 AM. edit (admin only)

zenlist

Hmm.. the host I was using for my tracks based to do list seems to have been out of service for a week now. Seems maybe I should look at getting ruby/tracks sorted out on craigbeattie.com somewhere.

more pet updates sadly

written by admin on November 8th, 2006 @ 01:59 AM. edit (admin only)

A couple of the fish died today – Jack and Stumpy. Jack was a ghost coy fish, our largest. He had a kink in his body so sort of had an ‘S’ shaped spine, quite a character and will be missed. Stumpy was the wee gold fish who seemed to have been born without a tail. It never slowed him down and he always brought a smile to our faces in the tank.

I’ll be getting the tank cleaned out asap tomorrow – bit late now for the 2-3 hour job tbh. It looks like the filter needed cleaning but as I recall it didn’t seem that bad at the weekend. Easy in hindsight to rethink these things.

RIP stumpy and jack…

Pets update

written by admin on November 4th, 2006 @ 02:18 AM. edit (admin only)

Well the most recent news from just before the wedding was the new snail type chaps arriving. In the wild I guess many of the kids wouldn’t have made it but we have had a very high survival rate and have a large number of snails of varying sizes living in 3 separate tanks. Very cool.

Macy cat is getting to be a little old lady bless her. Looks like the stairs are proving too much of a challenge and she’s made a home for herself under the dining room table. This is near a radiator and the table cloth keeps it pretty enclosed and cosy so she’s happy. We’ve had to organise things a little differently around her but I think she’s happy with it now. Vet visit for her Monday for a check up.

Misty rabbit is still much the same as always, bit soppy, bit jumpy and quite mad.

Joe-joe (hamster) and louie (gerbil) are both doing fine too…

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