My brother is graduating from college this week with a degree in computer science. How very exciting. Additionally, my girlfriend is graduating the following week. Oh, and her brother graduated from high school this week (which came as a huge surprise to everyone involved, but a happy surprise none-the-less). On top of all that, my girlfriend has been insane with projects and requesting my help, etc etc. We had to go to the hometown fair on Saturday so that she could get some photos for her photo project.

Whew... at least the worst of it is overOHMYGOD... YESTERDAY WAS OUR 7 YEAR ANNIVERSARY AND I FORGOT IT!!!! Man... I am such a yutz. I spent all day with her, we were watching movies and hanging out. Mostly, she was working on her projects and I was doing laundry and the various weekly chores... you know how I do. So, I make a nice spaghetti dinner for the two of us, we have some wine, hang out for a while, and she says that she wants to go get some ice cream. We have been dieting for the last couple months, but I figure, whatever it's been such a good day, let's go get ice cream. So, we go to Denny's because it is 10PM and it is essentially the only ice cream vendor open. I order a banana split and she orders the oreo shake. Once the food gets there she says "so, is this like our anniversary desert?"

I swear to god, I almost killed myself on the spot. She is great and understanding about the whole affair, and she said that it was a good anniverary even though I didn't say "happy anniversary" all day until she reminded me, but I still feel like swine for having forgotten. I literally have post-its all over my desk at work reminding me. Oh well, damage done... I owe her diamonds...


Let's talk WoW. We had to post-pone our matches until this weekend because of my brother's crazy end-of-year-schedule, and as such, we fought only our counter-comps. I decided we should try some extra druid+warrior in hopes that they would do better... only to be saddened by getting better geared warrior+healer comps 4 times. So, we switched over to warlock+spriest and I decided that I didn't care anymore, I was going to record some arena footage. The first match I recorded was against rogue+paladin, which we lost, but only because of lag. My brother simply could NOT get mass dispel to fire... at all. The rogue was feared around a pillar at 15%, the pally was bubbled at 15% trying to heal his rogue who lost LoS on him, and my brother couldn't get mass dispel to fire. I have the video recorded, and it's pretty funny because I had written off the rogue and just kept firing sbolts into the pally expecting bubble to burst at any second. Then, the rogue came back and killed my brother, then me. Very disturbing.

The second match I recorded was against a hunter+priest in Lordearon. We came out guns-a-blazing and tried to burst down the hunter while cc'ing the priest... which worked pretty well until the hunter turned big and red. I got scared, as I was the target. However, I am always prepared to hide from huge damage dealers. I had full dots out with the priest feared when big red popped, so I played LoS really hard against the hunter on the pillar and tried to dot down his pet at the same time. I was taking pretty insane damage the whole time from the pet and the disc priest's dot, and I got down to ~4k health after healthstone when big red wore off. So, I started doing direct damage on the hunter again while cc'ing the priest. At this point, I had basically written off the match as a loss because our hp disadvantage was so amazing... we were both at <5k and the hunter was at 75% with the priest at full. So, I started by botching an immolate on the hunter, then jumping off the pillar without dotting the hunter to fear the priest. I got back on the hunter and dropped a shadow bolt, and the hunter went from 50% to dead. In the video, I can be seen following after the dead hunter and trying to target and cast sbolt on him again because I thought it was feign death. At this point, I turned off my video recording because I was at 400 hp and figured it a loss.

My brother and I had to watch that video about 5 times each before we figured out what exactly happened. My scrolling combat text apparently didn't catch a shadowbolt crit, because the hunter gets shadow vulnerability for about 1/10 of a second before dying as my brother drops mind blast and death on him as a last-ditch attempt at victory. If the math works out, my shadowbolt crit against 350 resilience should do about 2000 and give shadow vulnerability, which increases shadow direct damage by 20%. My brother's mind blast would then hit (not crit) for about 2k and death would do about the same. All tolled, we probably dropped about 6k damage (maybe more if his stuff crit too) the instant my sbolt landed. As for timing, it has never been more perfect. Sadly, because I thought that the match was a loss and turned off the video recording, it ends right after we kill the hunter... so I cannot prove it was a win... people will just have to take my word for it. If nothing else, it will look awesome as a "we can do 50% of a full s3 hunter's health in <1 second" clip.

I finally got my video recording thing (the built in mac recording by blizzard) working so that I don't get any frame rate lag while recording, and the output is really quite astoundingly good. So, the hope is that in a few weeks (maybe a month or two) I will have some video to post as once my brother graduates we will actually do more than 10 arena matches per week. Here's hoping.