Merry Christmas from all of us in Downfall to all of yours! May all your loots be purple and your connections be stable! 

My last post about discovering and correcting your latency in WoW was a big hit, so here's another easy-as-hell tool we can all use to make sure we're performing optimally:

http://www.devicedoctor.com/

Download it and run it. Device Doctor is easy and quick and will allow you to update all those drivers that I just KNOW you're all forgetting to update. Key drivers that every WoW player should have updated are:

• Network drivers
• video card drivers
• sound drivers
• various chipset drivers

Device Doctor should discover if you're behind on any of them and allow you to one-click install them. No excuse, go update yo' shit.

Assumption: "Paladins should socket nothing but 20 int gems, regardless of socket bonus and other stats since int gives sp, effective mp5 and mana."

After being told I was a "lolfag" for "socketing mp5" this evening, I decided to go verify if the conventional wisdom that all paladins should only socket 20 int gems held true. After all, if all of Ensidia's paladins socket nothing but Int, that must mean it's the absolute only way to go, right? We all want to be as good as Ensidia, right?

Well, I don't "socket mp5". I socket for what I deem decent socket bonuses that allow for greater throughput without gimping my longevity. You see, I don't run out of mana. You've heard me brag, and you've seen me at 40% mana on most boss deaths. On tonight's hard mode Mimiron, on our kill with 1 second to spare, I still had 30% mana after nonstop power-healing for the duration of the fight. I'd like to think I did pretty good.

So, would I have done "better" if I had socketed nothing but int? No. And here's why:

If you're not running out of mana (which I'm not), current ToC paladin itemization makes socket bonuses outweigh pure-int socketing when looking at THROUGHPUT. In the case of our gear (or, specifically, my gear) almost all socket bonuses are in SP. As awesome as the coefficient is for int->sp for paladins (20% of total int is converted into spell power), the set bonuses along with my various int/sp gems outweigh the conversion of only int to sp. Here's a chart:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AnOmFUzXaXK6dDRqalVUODFuZGVKZG9HdGNFSHJFWnc&hl=en

There are three scenarios listed:

1. Current gear where I use 10int/5mp5 to hit socket bonuses on various items<
2. Where I replace ONLY those 10int/5mp5 gems with 20 int gems and thus break the bonuses on those items
3. Where I replace everything with 20 int gems

What really matters are the bottom, bold numbers: mana pool, effective mp5, and spell power. As we can see moving from scenario 1 to scenario 3, I'm gaining mana pool and losing SP.

So, yay! I gain mana and a lot of mp5! But wait. I don't need either. I'm already outlasting every boss. I need that SP (and more haste, imo) while carefully balancing int and existing mp5. We're not wiping in Phase 3 HM Anub because I'm running out of mana. A bigger mana pool simply doesn't help me do my job better.

So why all this "conventional wisdom" about socketing nothing but int? Well, because 1) it's easy and 2) it's good enough. When a newbie pally asks me what he should socket, I say "int" because it's easier that going over all his gear and play style. When elitist dickbags in other guilds on Gorg accost me for "socketing mp5", not only are they showing they only know how to cookie-cutter in this game they also show that they're terrible at arithmetic. My suggestion to them is: Add up the numbers, be a better player, don't fall back on dismissive platitudes. 

And, if Ensidia does it, that must be the only way to do it, right?

As some of you know, I'm a Drupal developer/themer/consultant. Drupal is the content management framework that runs this website. It's incredibly powerful with features limited only to our imaginations.

Now, like the car mechanic whose own car is crap, Downfallguild.org has been pretty neglected. I'm reaching out to you guys for some ideas.

First, something we have in the works: Downfall is about to get a "Raids" section of the site that not only gives us a heads up display about every raid we have, but shows members of that raid, upcoming scheduled raids, raid leaders, latest boss kills and mascot images.  People starting up 10-man raids will be able to start up their own groups, with their own areas to discuss their raid issues.This ties into the our upcoming "character" system that allows us to associate our toons with our site accounts. A little bit of this can be seen here: /wowarmory

Now, what I'd like to see from you guys: Ideas. Heavy site users like Saedo, Kwondre, Knoppix and others, I'd like some input about what you guys would LIKE to do on the site. Blogs and forums are fine, but could we do more? A better tracker by chance?Have you guys seen featuers on another site that you'd like to see emulated here?

I'd like you all start here: http://drupal.org/project/modules?filters=drupal_core:87&solrsort=sort_title%20asc.  That's a list of all the modules available to Drupal that are compatible with our version. Do you see any modules that stand out as being badass and something that would benefit our guild/raids/new-site-users?

Please no "I want ice cream sprinkled with diamonds and a pony" posts, only legitimate input. Thanks for your help. Let me know if you have any questions about Drupal!

 testing image assist upgrade

test

Go read this now:

http://www.cracked.com/blog/understanding-the-world-of-warcraft-using-super-mario-brothers/

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Back yet?  Good. Now that you're back from changing your pants from laughter-poop I have to share my favorite line from that article:

Here’s where it gets tricky. When you tell 25 people to go to The Caverns of Time, seven of them don’t know what that is, two of them aren’t playing anymore, one fell asleep in his pizza, two have to drive their kids to therapy, one tells you to shut the fuck up, four are rebooting their computers, one is getting kicked off by his parents, two are lost foreigners who thought this was the train station, one is pressing enter on the same Chuck Norris joke over and over, two of them tell everyone to go to three different places and one is your girlfriend bitching at you about how much this sucks.

That makes me LOL endlessly and I just wanted to share. Also, for the first time in my life, I've found the EXACT set of words to describe what it's like to lead a raid and then watch your raiders fuck it up spectacularly:

Imagine you’re trying to teach your son to play baseball. You teach him the rules, how to throw, how to swing and when you tell him to go for it, he throws the ball into the side of his own head, runs the wrong way and tries to sell a blowjob to an undercover cop. Warcraft players fail in directions you never thought possible