WoWinsider has a funny article up by Amanda Rivera about the Life Lessons of WoW. In it, she mentions learning the hard way one should not activate Autorun in Zul’farak. Two articles later, Arther Orneck chimes in with “Time for Plan B“.

Since the theme of the morning seems to be learning from our mistakes, the hard way, I have a perfect story for you.

Now, back when I first started playing WoW, I was faced with that most critical of decisions, and armed with too little information: What the hell class should I play?

My initial desire was to play a Hunter.

Now remember, we’re talking two years ago. I had just installed this massive multi-disc program onto my computer, configured my account, downloaded the eternal patches, and was faced with the very first choice after server - a blank character creation screen.

What the hell do I know about the classes?

I read the stuff in the manual that came with the game, and the little sidebar blurbs that come up when you choose a combo. And Hunters sounded very fun. You get a pet, and kittys can be your pet. A pet kitty that fights with you! What’s not to like!

Ah, but then there is the Druid…. you don’t GET a pet kitty, you ARE the pet kitty! Oh, hell yeah! That’s for me!

And thus are the great decisions of life made. The mental image of a cat, running stealthily through the grass, stirring nothing in her passing, much like the shadow of the passing wind, gave me a name that was suitably RP enough for a former GURPS player with delusions of creativity. Logging in… and we’re off!

Now, just around hitting level 20 - 21, and getting my cat form, I took my first steps in looking for more information on what the hell kind of gear I was supposed to use. I’d check the Auction House, and there would be this gear with +Spirit, +Agility, +Strength… which one is what I’M supposed to pick? Why doesn’t Blizz just say so? There’s 5 million subscribers to this game, SOMEONE must have asked this question before, damn it!

And thus began my first trip to the WoW Community Forums… where I shortly therafter fled in terror at this new thing, called the ‘forum troll’.. a creature that apparently takes pleasure and delight in being as offensive as possible, in the hopes of getting a rise out of someone. If you got offended and responded, apparently, they won. Won what, I didn’t wait to find out.

My brief jaunt did gave me the idea that I should choose +Agility gear, because 1 point of Strength = 2 Attack Power… but 1 point of Agility also = 2 Attack Power, and gave bonuses to critical strike chance, dodge, and armor as well. So, when given a choice, I clearly should be choosing Agility, and only adding Strength when Agi wasn’t an option. And from the impressions I had, I only needed 1 set of gear for my feral adventuring anyway, and one set for healing!

Fast forward almost 6 months, to level 57-58.

My gear to this date has been chosen following those dimly remembered guidelines. I’m having fun playing the game, I’m kicking ass, and I am NOT going anywhere outside the game for news or info except to Thottbot or Kalibans’ Class Loot Lists, and that is just to help guide me on where to adventure or what quests to do next that give me rewards.

And one day, as I’m pondering some of the choices that Kalibans’ list is presenting as top feral Druid gear, and comparing it to mine, it occurs to me to wonder why they are stressing Strength gear so much over Agility.

Older at this point, and wiser in the ways of the WoW, I start doing a more focused investigation of Druid preferred stats and abilities.

And it is only then, in my mid to high 50s, that I found a little snippet of info somewhere…

That told me I was 100% wrong in my baseline assumptions of gear. That in all forms, Druids gain 2 Attack Power per 1 point of Strength… and in CAT FORM ONLY, Druids gain 1 Attack Power per point of Agility. And Heart of the Wild, dumbass, improves Strength, not Agility, for a reason..

/cower

Overnight I went and re-evaluated all my gear, and began making my choices based on a more balanced mix of Strength for AP and Agi for dodge and crit. And sadly, I just about doubled my AP at the time. /sigh

If I ever start thinking I know what the hell I’m doing, all I have to do is think about that feeling I got of pure “DOH!!!”, and it brings me right the heck back to reality.

Does anyone else have a favorite “Oh, damn, that was stupid” choice or action they’d like to share? Feel free to make me feel better

Kinda strange where conversations can take you…

This rambling post has nothing to do with gaming, so if some QQing ain’t your thing, then you can safely pass this one up. See? ain’t I nice?

Back in the day, after I left the service, I was looking for something to make ends meet in the tough Southern California job market. In the mid nineties, the market was saturated with eager young electronics gurus, and no one was hiring The big two, Motorola and 3M, certainly weren’t, and Qualcomm was heading downhill.

So, following the philosophy that the world will always need folks that don’t mind getting their hands greasy, I went looking for something else, and since I’d enjoyed driving 5-ton trucks, humvees and such in the service when the chance came up, I figured I’d go to a commercial truck driver school, get my CDL class A license, and go drive a truck while I figured stuff out.

I graduated from the school, a 6 week course I think, and got recruited by a company called Dick Simon Trucking based out of Salt Lake City, a company that ran refrigerated 53′ trailers Over The Road in the lower 48 states, Canada and Mexico.

I spent the first 3 months riding with a ‘trainer’ in a shared truck cab, a nice guy that lived out of Salt Lake, doing boomerang runs from Salt Lake City to Boise, up to Seattle, and then back again for Albertsons’. Trainer was former Navy, married, owned a beautiful home in the area, and we got along real well. I heard lots of horror stories of trainers, so I was very fortunate. After my ‘orientation and an up check, I got my own nice shiny new truck, and spent the next two years driving over the road, and seeing this beautiful country of ours. I might have spent all of a weekend a month during those two years not on the road.

In that time, I learned that I loved the mountains and forests of northern Washington state, Virginia and West Virginia, and lots of Kentucky and Tennessee. And I learned that the country is, in reality, VERY, VERY small. Cities are very densely populated, and that can give a city kid the impression that the whole country is one teeming mass of folks (like much of eastern Europe), but the reality is that the US is one vast, empty landscape dotted with the occasional outbreak of civilisation.

Overall, I loved the driving and seeing the country, but the hardest part was seeing wonderful things, and having no one there to share the experience with. I could easily see someday doing the RV thing with my wife, and enjoying driving just to be seeing some of those wonderful sights again, like the look of the Sun over the river while pulling out of the mountains between Idaho and Oregon… having someone you love with you to share the experience would be very cool.

This all came to my mind today, because I was talking to a coworker who is thinking about retiring from his current electronics job, and going owner-operator over the road with his wife. It made me feel nostalgic about my old trucking days, and I decided to troll the internet looking for pictures of Dick Simon ’skunk’ trucks, like what I used to drive.

What I found out was that, shortly after I left the company, one of the drivers for Dick Simon apparently had a deranged episode, went insane, and while in Sacramento, California, decided to circle the State Capitol, prior to accelerating to full speed and then ramming the Capitol building, resulting in the explosion of the truck, the death of the driver in the ensueing fireball, and considerable damage to the California State Capitol itself.

Sometimes, life is just so crazy. You just can’t make shit like that up.

According to news reports, it came out that the trainer that was supposed to spend 3 months with the guy told the company that the guy was nuts and needed to be let go. And whoever it was in charge of that stuff at Dick Simon refused, and gave the guy his own truck. So the State of California sued Dick Simon Trucking, and shortly thereafter the company filed chapter 11, the assets were sold off, and became a part of Central Refrigeration, under the CEO of Swift Trucking.

So, I go trolling the ‘net for pictures and find out that the entire company I drove for no longer exists. The trucks are not on the road. If I tell people I drove a ’skunk truck’, they will never see one on the road to know what the heck I’m talking about.

I never had any thought of ever going back to that kind of life… but it still feels like a part of my past is lost or something. Heck, I still have a big exercise bag embroidered with my name and the company logo that was given to me on my two year anniversary with the company… and I just used it on vacation. It may have been ten years ago that I was a driver, but emotionally it just wasn’t THAT long ago. Maybe this is what it feel slike to go back to your home town and find out they bulldozed the family homestead to make a mini-mart (Grosse Point Blank)

Eh, I dunno. I just feel weird about it. And very, very old.