Just wanted to say hi.

Hey, blogging is fun! I could get used to this!

I wonder what this thingie does….

Oooh, the backend code is neat, too!

Bye now!

I’ve had people say for months that there were problems with the Contact Form, and I have no idea why… it seems like 100 people get it to work fine one day, and then the very next morning I see at least three comments from people who say it wouldn’t work for them.

I have no idea how many people might have tried contacting me, had it fail, and just gave up, and I don’t know what’s wrong with the plugin, so I updated the Contact page with an email address. I’ll leave that up until someone that knows what the heck they’re doing can look at the Contact Form code.

I like the Contact Form, because when I get the email, I can see from the formatting it’s from the blog and it makes it past my spam filters 100% of the time.

Anyway, so there is that.

The other thing is, I just wanted to say that when I went to bed last night, I had some serious doubts as to whether or not I was coming back today.

This blogging has always been, to me, about having fun chatting with friends, and sharing things with friends that I think are cool in WoW.

When I started the blog, it grew out of posting long rants and stuff in a small Yahoo group of just my few friends in our WoW guild, and it grew from there into a blog that was still just the same people, and maybe a handful more that BRK sent to me because he mentioned me once a long time ago.

As things have grown and changed, intellectually I’ve known that more people have been reading, but emotionally, I’ve always felt that my audience, the folks that visit here, are just part of my circle of friends.

That’s why I share everything that I do about what’s going on in my life. It’s why I post some of the things that, in hindsight, readers of a ‘feral druid blog’ probably think are just… stupid, and a waste of your time.

I see a funny WoW related vid, and think “Oooh I bet my friends would get a kick out of that.”

I shared my PBeM game that Manny and James and I have been playing in the same spirit of wanting to share something I’m proud of with my friends.

Even writing for WoW Insider… I was incredibly surprised to be asked to do that. And I have written very differently over there, because I do not feel my audience over there is made up solely of friends, I feel it is made up of mostly serious players looking for advice, tips and strategies. So I write serious Druid stuff for the most part, and I take making my articles valuable to the Druid community seriously when I write for them.

But it still felt like, the players that read over there are more the ‘norm’ of strangers looking for tips, and that when I come back here to blog, it’s back to chatting with friends. I think my biggest mistake there was putting a link to my blog in the articles.

The events of the last few days, the teeny bit of stuff in the public comments and the deluge of SHIT on my email, has brought that house of cards crashing down.

I no longer feel like I’m just chatting with friends. After some of the shit I’ve read in my email, I’m sorry, but emotionally… it’s a bunch of faceless strangers staring at me and judging me and my life. 

TJ has chatted with me in the past, and she’s tried to beat into me this thing about how big I am in blogging for WoW, and that I must be doing this for fame or I wouldn’t be doing it in the first place, and I never understood what she was saying. I just didn’t get it. I’m chatting with friends, I was doing it when there were 3 other people reading it, nothing has changed since then except I’ve got more friends now. Who gives a shit about being famous? What am I, Britney Spears? I don’t THINK so, thank you very much.

But… now I see what she meant. If I’m not doing all this for fame, then what reasonable person puts themselves out there like this in front of total strangers that have no problem ripping you apart in a personal manner, in the foulest of language, in personal emails, apparently trying to ‘win’ the internet.

So… I don’t know.

I do know that I went to bed last night pretty much thinking that I was done. This morning, I saw that I had a bunch of smart advice and nice words from folks that I do think of as friends posted about the MgT run, and that plus a couple of emails from other WoW friends just saying ‘hi’ helped remind me that everyone I like is still here… it’s just that there are a bunch of OTHER folks here too. 

I need to remember that I’m not just chatting with friends, put that knowledge in a compartment, and then forget it. My friends are what it’s about, and screw the rest of the people that have nothing better to do with their lives than… screw it. They’re not worth my time.

Please bear with me a bit, because it’s gonna take me a while to regain my sense of humor about this. 

I’m thinking of it like this… where before, I felt like I invited some friends over to my house, and we were all hanging out and chatting in the comfort of the living room… now, I feel like I went out to a bar, and invited a bunch of friends over, and we’re sitting there having a few pints and chatting and having a great time… but the bar is crowded, and there are plenty of people standing around our table, just standing and wathcing, close enough to overhear, and bored. And listening to us is a good way to pass the time as they have a few drinks.

And they’re not really our friends, and they don’t really give a shit… but if they hear something someone says they disagree with, they’ll sure as hell make sure we know it.

It’s not that big a deal… I just gotta remember that I don’t give a shit what the strangers think… it’s all about what my FRIENDS think.

Yeah, if I was as emo now as I was in High school, I’d pull out the Violent Femmes and spin “Good Feeling”. Oh, boo hoo.

As it is… I’ma gonna go play. Damn it, it’s late enough in the morning that I bet the good easy farming of ore is gone! Crap!

My friends, thank you for being you, and I am grateful that you made for me this imaginary little dream world where I thought everyone in the entire world that I knew was cool… whether you ever commented or hung out and had fun, you each know who you are, you are what has made this so much fun for the last year, and each and every one of you rocks. Thank you for being awesome. 

It is my personal pleasure to direct all of you to the grand premiere of the new home of loldruid fun and games, The Road to Blizzcon!

Some are calling it a brand new webcomic, but I think that it is a much greater treasure.

 You see, the site is being done by two truly cool people, Doodlebug and Eustacious, and I am fortunate enough to be able to say that I have actually chatted with them both. They is like, teh uber leet coolness x500. I haz had a brush with greatness! Or at least some minor grooming.

The Road to Blizzcon will document the adventures of our two droods as they try to make their way from Azeroth to the epic coolness of Blizzcon.

I am certain that, quite often, hijinks will ensue.

Hijinks, I said!

So check it out, bookmark it, enjoy it… leave your crankiness at the door (I’ll certainly try) and just enjoy the light hearted druid fun!

Okay, so I know there is a lot of news coming out, and as we are still a LONG way away from Wrath being released, I am not going to try to analyze stuff… yet.

But just in case you haven’t seen it yet, and so you know it’s out there so you can go look for more info, here are some of the things said at the Blizzard World Wide Invitationaal about Feral Druids…

First, there WILL be a brand new Dire Cat form with a new model, AND there will be a new model for Dire Bear form.

A panelist said that, when asked about changing the appearance of the skins for Druid forms, that they are thinking maybe, but they are afraid of community outcry, after the unanticipated rage they experienced over changes they made to Rogue Stealth animations in previous patches.

So, MAYBE they are thinking of changing the forms to a more beautiful appearance like Andriges’ work, but maybe not.

Shaman’s Windfury Totem WILL affect Druids in forms… AND will coexist with weapon buffs such as Weightstones, because Windfury Totem will be a player buff rather than a weapon buff.

That is a massive change, as far as Feral Druids go. Matt Rossi on the podcast mentioned it first, damn him, but I was gonna say it too… being the main tank as a Bear and having Windfury active? OMIGOD!!!!

Oh, and… Shaman Totems will affect the entire raid, NOT just the 5 man segment of the raid they happen to be in. Hey, that’s what they said. So, not only do you get Windfury Totem as Bear tank (or Kitty), but you also get Strength of Earth and Grace of Air.. oh, and did I mention they are COMBINING Strength of Earth and Grace of Air into one totem? And that is even if the Shaman is NOT in your 5 man segment of teh raid.

So yeah.. Shamans are going to be MASSIVELY buffing Feral Druids with Windfury… I love it.

And they said that they are working on the Feral Druid range bug, and they MAY have it fixed by the time Warthof the Lich King is released. LOL.

They are NOT removing Diminishing Returns from Cyclone as they had discussed. Instead, they are making Entangling Roots work indoors AND out! Viable Druid CC! Without long cast times! Yay!

So…. that’s what we got so far… and as Wrath is playable at the WWI, I bet we are going to get tons of hands on impressions.

I hope that this encourages you to go seek out more info… I know that WoW Insider has been doing a great job at covering everything. While I pugged Kara last night with Cassieann and Doodlebug until 1:00 AM, WoW Insider were up all night long freaking out and transcribing and going nuts.

So now that I’ve whet your curiosity.. go! Have fun!

Oh, and just cause I can’t help myself… Hunter’s PETS get their own talent trees, three trees, Utility, DPS and Tanking. God, that is gonna be fun to play with.  AND, there will be new pet classes… AND some pet classes will have unique abilities in their trees! Expect BRK and Mania to go nuts… I wish I could see the look on Mania’s face right about now. OMIGOD TALENT TREES, GREAT… BUT, (here it comes…) when asked about new Pet Stable Slots.. a single word answer from the panel… NO.

WTF?!?

I said I’d write it up on the Twisted Nether blogcast, so here we go. 

Two macros that use the Focus mechanic to select a target that you can attack WITHOUT having it selected as your current target, and attack that Focus with Lacerate or Swipe. 

(Don’t panic, a text version of them is in the commets below for copy/pasting. Just copy/paste to Notepad first to clear formatting, since sometimes hidden html makes it from a website straight to the WoW macro section). 

World of Warcraft allows you to set what is called a ‘Focus’.

What a Focus is, is a target you save into memory. After you save that target as a Focus, you can go on about your business, targeting other things, attacking other things, it doesn’t matter. You will continue to have that original target saved as a Focus.

What this let’s you do is write a macro that streamlines the process of making a selected target your Focus, and then when you have targeted something else and are viciously fighting it, you can throw attacks in the direction of your Focus without ever changing who you are currently targeted on.

That’s the key thing; your macro let’s you send a specific attack against a pre-selected enemy other than your current target.

What these macros do, exactly, is as follows;

1) Show the tooltip for the selected ability. When you create the macro, you will need to choose the ‘question mark’ icon for the picture, it will change to the picture of your ability once you move the whole thing to your toolbar.

2) It will clear your saved Focus IF and ONLY IF certain conditions are met;

If you are holding down the Alt key when you activate the macro, your Focus will be cleared. Use this if you accidentally targeted and made your Focus the wrong enemy by mistake. You need to use this because the thing you made your Focus, if it was by mistake, will remain alive and so the macro won’t clear it on it’s own.

If your previous Focus target dies, then the next time you activate this macro, it will clear the previous Focus from memory automatically.

If you make a friend your Focus, for whatever reason, then the next time you try and activate this attack macro it will see your Focus is a friend and will clear it.

If your previous target fades away/despawns while you are doing other things, then it no longer counts as dead. If the Focus has despawned and no longer exists, the Focus is cleared for other uses.

3) The macro now will set your current selected target as the active Focus, SO LONG AS YOU DON’T CURRENTLY HAVE A FOCUS SET UP.

This means the macro is a fire and forget attack on your Focus. You target something, activate the macro the first time, and it sees you don’t currently have a Focus, so it sets your currently active target as the Focus and tries to perform your programmed ‘cast’ action.

If you happen to be out of range of that activity, then you will set the active Focus, but no cast action actually occurs that time. Every time after that, until one of the /clearfocus conditions are met, when you activate the macro it will try to apply your selected cast action. 

It does this whether or not you are in range for whatever ability is supposed to be activated later. From then on, so long as that enemy is alive, it is your Focus. Just remember, if you need to clear your Focus target while it’s still alive so you can select a new Focus to attack, hold down the Alt key when you trigger the macro. 

4) The actual workhorse part of the macro. If you have an active Focus, and it is in range or otherwise fulfills the requirements of the ability you place here, you will cast that attack on the Focus.

The core mechanics of the Focus macros I listed above work great for many different abilities. For example, it is the foundation of the Shackle macro I use on my Priest.

In this particular case, you can use these two macros as ‘X’ target threat generators to help spread your threat generating attacks around.

The idea is, say you have three (or more) targets, but you only need to be tanking two. And it’s close quarters, and you’re afraid your Swipe will break an Ice Trap or a Sheep.

You have a ‘Skull’ target that you will be concentrating on applying the majority of your threat to. I assume you will be attacking the Skull with your Mangle, most of your Lacerates, Feral Faerie Fire, Maul, all that jazz. The Skull is the target your fellow party members are attempting to burn down first, so you want to apply the most threat here.

However, the ‘X’ is the target that your party will try to burn down NEXT. And in the heat of battle it is common for your party to simply redirect the full force of their damage on the ‘X’, all at once. You want to be attacking that sucker and building up pre-emptive threat. And you dno’t want to use Swipe indiscriminately.

With the Lacerate Focus macro, if you set your Focus to the ‘X’, which you can do well out of range just to make sure your Focus is set to your target well before you engage them, then you can select and pull Skull as your main target, and use your Lacerate Focus macro to lacerate the ‘X’ when you choose, precisely. No tabbing or mouse clicking. 

Just, once your enemies get within range, direct your first Mangle and Lacerate to Skull just like normal, hit the Lacerate Focus macro to slam ‘X’ with a Lacerate, hit Mangle again on your still-targeted Skull, etc etc.

As you fight, back away from the Crowd Controlled mobs, so you free up Swipe as an option. Begin to throw Swipe in there, as well. But you will find that you can get some solid threat on both your main and secondary target by adding the lacerate Focus macro to Swiping, and when the Skull finally goes down, your party has plenty of room to let it all out on ‘X’ right from the start.

The Swipe Focus macro comes into play if you are going to be tanking four or more targets, such as in a larger than normal non-elite AOE group.

If you have decided not to use Barkskin-Hurricane to AoE a group, then you can set your Focus as the far left mob of the group, choose the far right mob as your main target, and when you pull, chances are fairly good that you will have Swipe on your main target hitting three mobs on the right, and your Swipe Focus macro hitting three mobs on the left. With, assuming you don’t have more than 6 targets, good overlap.

Doing this takes the ’seat of your pants’ decision making ability out of the picture to a large extent if you get into the habit of doing this all the time. And that is something I don’t recommend. This is absolutely NOT ‘end-game raiding’ kind of tactics.

When you are just starting out, though, having a means to make damn sure you are applying solid threat to your top two targets without tab-targeting or hunting through tightly packed mob nameplates looking for the one you want next can be a big help.

At higher level gear, you will find that Swipe itself, which has a chance to Crit every hit mob, will do very high threat, almost replacing Lacerate entirely. Also, with more powerful DPS as they gear up, fights will become very short as you scramble to apply enough threat as the Skull drops in three seconds, followed by the ‘X’ 2 seconds later.

Because of the way things become so fast paced later on, I prefer seat of the butt improvisation at this point, reacting to changing situations on the fly. Someone gets feared into a group and brings 4 more adds? A macro ain’t gonna help you pick up those mobs and get them locked down.

You’re going to have to be able to improvise, use your Growl, change targets fast and throw Lacerates and Swipes everywhere, use your Challenging Roar to get the group to start hitting you and begin taking Thorns damage, and everything else in your repertoir to grab aggro and hold on tight.

But when you are grouping up in an instance, and you have the luxury of lining up your Marks ahead of time (and if you are assigning target marks, do yourself a favor and download the Quickmarks addon), then a couple Focus macros can help you spread your threat out over two mobs with precision, and help you spread the Swiping love in alrger fights.

I invite all the rest of you tanks out there to suggest your own entry-level 70 tanking techniques to precisely apply Threat. I’m sure there are plenty of wizardry out there to draw on!

Remember, we’re talking here about techniques that a brand new, possibly undergeared level 70 bear tank can use to grab and hold threat on your secondary targets. Simplify!