I want to give a thanks and shout out to Pugnacious Priest.

I did a little blog hopping from blog link to blog link, and along the way came across Pugnacious Priest for the first time.

Now, I gots me a 64 Shadow Priest, so I like Priest blogs in the first place, but I saw this post about How to make a quick and dirty blog or guild website banner image.

As many of you are aware, when I left Legatum Ignavis and raiding, I decided to remain in and open up the guild that me and my close friends have held for years, Sidhe Devils. It had been where our alts kept their home, it had some guild bank space to stash low level mats and give us a place to park our guys without clogging up ’serious’ guilds, you know. An alt guild.

Well, in opening it up to new members, we knew we needed a nice website, so Cassieann set up a guildportal site. And we would need some voice chat options for 5 mans, so we got a small Ventrilo server. (Thanks for the link to the vent server service, Matticus, I used your website link to go get the server. Their front end and quality seems to rock.)

This morning, I got an email saying that some, currently unknown, benefactor had paid to upgrade the guildportal website to a full feature site. Now, it wasn’t Cassie or I, so we have no idea who did it… but we certainly thank you.

In the process, I put two and two together… new paid-for guild website with forums… a post about how to make a quick and dirty banner image… hmmmm.

So I went and made one, and it took 5 minutes, no Photoshop like I used for my blog back in teh day, and it turned out very nice, IMO.

If you are in the position of wanting to make a banner image with text and borders for your blog or guild website, I heartily urge you to go and read Pugnacious Priests’ post and have fun with it… if I can do it, so can you!

Just a little one, 2.4.2.

It ain’t out yet, sadly, but the patch notes are pretty interesting.

WoW Insider posted the full notes, so I’ll send you over there.

The thing I like best?

All profession cooldowns have been reduced.

If you had a 23 hour cooldown (like, say, for a transmute) then it will now be 20 hours.

It may not seem like much, but I know there have been many nights where Cassieann wants to do her transmute, but it’s not up until 10:30 because she last used it really late. So she decides to wait until the next night rather than stay up just to do a transmute. Three hours will be a big deal.

The thing I DON’T like?

If you get sheeped by a bad guy, you no longer heal.

Now, maybe you don’t notice it so much solo, but there is one case that I can think of off hand that this will suck.

Shade of Aran.

If you’re a borderline team running Karazhan, and by borderline I don’t mean a bad group, I mean a group that is adequately geared for the instance and still working on getting upgrades instead of just running it for shits and giggles to farm badges, then this will likely suck.

If you’re a farm team, you go all out DPS on Shade, you keep his Health percentage 20%+ below his Mana, and he’ll be dead before he reaches the Polymorph/Pyroblast stage.

If you’re not that hardcore… then when his Mana reaches 20%, he Polymorphs the whole raid, and begins drinking to replenish his Mana. After 10 seconds, Polymorph breaks and he does an AOE Pyroblast that does around, IIRC, 7000 fire damage to everyone.

Now, this is fairly survivable right now, since everyone gets healed to full by the Polymorph. Standard tactic is for everyone in the group to save a Healthstone, and the second after the Pyroblast has gone off, use the Healthstone so you can’t be one shot.

Well, now… you’ll have whatever health you had before being sheeped… and it’s likely the Pyroblast itself will one shot you before you get to use your Healthstone.

Brutal.

I’ll be curious to see if this really goes live.

Oh… and many weapons listed as ‘Main Hand’ are now ‘One hand’… so players that dual wield have more choices for their off hands… Shammys, Fury warriors and Rogues should be delighted.