Movie Review: Forever Strong

Okay... absolutely nothing to do with Wow here. I guess that's what happens when you take the last 2 nights off of Wow. lol. At any rate...

I don't go out to the movies very often. With 4 young kids, we just don't make it out very often. But Netflix is our friend. :)

So, we randomly glance through movies that are coming out to see if there's anything that might be interesting. I'm generally a big fan of the sports movies that are based on real life events. Probably why we requested Forever Strong. Even though it's about a sport that I know mostly nothing about, Rugby.

If you like movies such as Remember the Titans, Hoosiers, The Rookie, you'll most likely enjoy this movie as well. Yes, it's about Rugby. The official web site is RugbyMovie.com. But you don't need to know anything about Rugby to enjoy the movie.

It stars Sean Faris as the main character. It also has Sean Astin (aka Samwise Gamgee, Rudy, and Mikey Walsh). One of the outtakes was a group of people in a crowd watching the game that included Sean Astin, and they started chanting "Rudy".

So for those that need to know more and are too lazy to go check out one of the links, here's the synopsis from the official site:

Rick Penning (Sean Faris, Never Back Down) lives life just like he plays rugby; fast, hard-hitting and intense. When life on the edge lands him in jail, prison ward Marcus Tate (Sean Astin, The Lord of the Rings) offers him a chance to get back in the game by playing for longtime rival teaml, Highland Rugby. Reluctantly Rick joins the team where he must adopt the grueling training schedule and uinque code of conduct that highland's legendary coach (Gary Cole, Office Space) demands. Egos clash and bitter competitors struggle to find the meaning of "team."

As on-field battles rage, hearts are challenged and loyalties are tried. Rick Penning decide if between the life he lived and a life that stands before him. With a national championship on the line, he will learn that the greatest victories are born in the heart.

p.s. That was verbatim from the site. 10 points awarded for pointing out each of the 3 grammar/spelling errors. Is it really that hard to proof-read something that goes out on a professional site about a product you're trying to sell?

Translating EQdkp-Plus

So, one of the mods for our web site that I've been playing with for months now is EQdkp-Plus. It's a pretty spiffy DKP handeler/tracker, and there's a lot of great features in it as well.

The major reason that I've played with it for months and not implemented it was because a lot of my testing of stuff like this goes on at work. (Believe it or not, it is slightly work related.) Long story short, I spent a lot of time trying to get my local machine to get through our proxy's here at work so that I could even install EQdkp-Plus. I wanted a protected environment where I could work out all the kinds. But since I could never figure out the reverse-proxy, I ended up throwing it up on our guild site in a test directory.

At any rate... that's not the point. The point is, is that they're looking for help. They're looking for people to help translate EQdkp-Plus to other languages.

Now the product itself is free, but comes with banners. For a donation of 10 Euros (about $14 at present), you can get a key to unlock that. For over 50 Euros, you get access to next versions, and for over 100, you get free support.

OR...

If you help translate now, you get a free Developer's Key which means that you have access to it all. So, if you know a foreign language, go over and help out here. The scary thing is, I'm at least one of the people that is a validator for Portuguese. Hope there's not huge differences between the Brazillian Portuguese I know and the Portugul Portuguese that some of the European people might be using. Furthermore, I hope I can remember enough to be accurate. lol.

Mountain Dew Game Fuel

I decided to shamelessly plug the Mountain Dew Sweepstakes. I'm not even sure I'm really interested in any of the prizes. I guess if I won the Headset, I'd pass it along to one of my guildies. (Poor college students, recently married, and I'm sick of hearing the echo when one of them talks. For the record, she's sick of it too.) Then again... I probably wouldn't say No to a free notebook computer either. But so far, the odds would probably be about 1 in 11,250 chance. And that's on the optimistic side. I'm guessing that a lot more people will sign up and try for that drawing. So, by advertising, I'm actually lowering my chances to win. lol.

The really funny thing is that there's almost 3 times the amount of people that want the notebook computer vs. a trip to Blizzcon. The trip is valued at about $3000 whereas the notebook is only $2000. Once again proving that we're all lazy and we don't really want to leave our homes. lol.

At any rate, go sign up, click on my banner and I get credits... and worst case scenario, I think we'll all get a little pet. (Just what I always wanted... another in-game pet. /rolls eyes)

Five Facts About Mages

Just a quick, fun link to pass along. Euripedes over at Critical QQ posted a funny (and true) post about Mages. Go over there and check it out.

Uber Death Knight (in Defensive Gear)

Primogeniture has basically undergone a bit of a change lately. To make a long story short, we've had some issues with numbers, so we're basically down to 10-mans for awhile. Last night, however, a few of us got together to run something to help (hopefully) gear up some of our healers a bit better.

Unfortunately, with the holiday, we didn't quite have the "required" 10-people. So, what do we do? Turn to the /lfm tool!

We were at 8 people, so we needed 2 more. We had the flexibility to just get 2 more DPS (some of our DPS were dual spec'ed as healers). Turns out we got 2 Death Knights.

So, we head over to Naxx to run through as much as that as possible. One of the DK's, we'll call him EbayKnight, discovers that he's magically in a different instance then we are. He's running around looking for Mr. Bigglesworth, but the rest of the group sees him alive right in front of us. EbayKnight remembers that he's already saved this week and leaves group. "Hey," we thought, "Why don't we just take his instance since it's Tuesday and it's obviously not going to get used." I ask which bosses are left, and he said that they cleared 3 quarters. Sweet! We'd actually get to finish off the last bosses in a small amount of time. So, we invite him back and he's thrilled.

Head in to Naxx. Yes, yes.. I want to be saved. But then we realize that all of the quarters are cleared since the lights are lit up. A quick jaunt up to Kel, and he's dead too... and all of us got saved to a cleared Naxx run. UGH!

Well, not really this guy's fault, right? I mean, how was EbayKnight to know that the other 9 people cleared it (and obviously without him)? So, let's go kill Emalon.

Wipe after wipe, we were just struggling. We realize off the bat EbayKnight is trouble since he never runs out for the Lightning. He also doesn't switch targets. And finally he helps to string the Chain Lightning as much as possible. Furthermore, the guy consistently does about 980 DPS!!! 9-manning Emalon, we could do, but that's without all this extra raid damage that he's causing. He wasn't on Vent (another point against him), so we told our healers to stop healing him. But it just doesn't happen. Finally somebody has the bright idea to look at this guy's gear. FULL TANK gear! Yep, every piece has defensive. So, we start asking him about it.

"So, EbayKnight, you got any DPS gear?"

"I'm wearing it."

"No, you're wearing tank gear. DPS gear doesn't have defense rating like tank gear does."

"Yeah, well my friend says I do fine in DPS."

"Okay... this ain't working." I think we left him with, "It's not you, it's us." lol. Got a rogue in there, and 1-shotted it.

So, yes... the title is mocking him. And Death Knights may be the new Huntard class.

Soldier in Pink Boxers

Picture dated May 11th. From FoxNews on May 22. Go check out the article.p.s. 3 posts in 1 day. I'm making up for lost time. lol.

Going to BlizzCon 2009

By the way... I did secure a ticket last Saturday to go to Blizzcon 2009. I think I'd like to be a bit more social this year than I was last year, so if anybody would like to hook up, I'd love to meet a few of you. But just a few. lol.

Add-On: Guild Tax

Disclaimer: I have not tried out this mod yet.

It seems like forever ago that I made a post about a Guild Tax for the Guild Vault. But just this morning, I got a comment on that post about a new mod that was developed by walking_fishy. It's called, quite simply, Guild Tax. It appears to be this developer's first mod. It was uploaded on 5/20, and 2 days later, it already has 36 downloads. (For a no-name mod, I'm guessing that's some pretty good marketing... or one person just downloaded it 36 times.)

The idea is this: By default, there's a 5% guild tax on "Small Change" (money off of mobs) and Quest Rewards. When you go to the Guild Vault, it's automatically deposited. And anyone in the guild with access to the Guild MOTD can change the tax to whatever they'd like.

But here's the nice thing about his philosophy: first of all, it's kind of on a volunteer basis. Each individual has to install the mod, so that means that they're agreeing to donate. It's not like this money is being taken straight out of somebody's loot either... you don't want to pay, simply don't visit the guild vault.

Next thing as you can see from the Screen Shot (from Curse) is you can disable any part of it. Planning to do a bunch of dailies for your own epic mount and want to save up? Disable the Quest Reward Tax Collection. Have a huge tax that you simply can't pay at the moment because you need to repair your red gear, but need to get a flask from the vault? Disable Bank Deposits.

I see it fitting along with how I play perfectly. I always mean to contribute to the Guild Vault, but since I usually have another officer take care of that, I usually forget. So, I think, I should contribute a large amount, but then I'm poor because I just Dual Spec'ed (or whatever reason you want to insert here).

For those Guild Leaders (or members) that want to make sure others are actually getting taxed, there's also a whisper command:

If you whisper a player who has the Guild Tax addon with the command '!GuildTax' you will get a reply with that players settings and their total tax paid.

So, bravo, Walking_Fishy. I'll have to check out this mod tonight.

XT-002 Deconstructor the Easy Way

I really haven't written much about Ulduar. Let's face it, I really haven't written much at all lately, but that's besides the point. The point is, that I'm coming to you today to give you a HUGE pointer for taking on Deconstructor in Ulduar. He's so easy, that he's essentially the new Loot Pinata for 3.1. Even more so, he's a robot, just like another Loot Pinata we used to know in TBC.

So... this "guide" assumes you've already killed Flame Leviathon (which is really the first Loot Pinata in Ulduar), because you have to have killed him in order to get to the next 3 bosses. I'm also not going to regurgitate what you can find on many other strategy guides out there. Go check out one of those guides for how to deal with the different abilities and what they are.

Come to think of it... this is really less of a "guide" and more of a "really, really big, helpful pointer". I'm guessing that the guildie that came up with it read in on a web site somewhere, I just don't know where that is.

All of the guides that I've run across tell you to tank Deconstructor on the stairs, at the top of the stairs, or at the bottom of the stairs. This is absolutely incorrect. Here's the secret: Tank it between two of the scrap piles on the side. Either side will do.

"But Leiandra? Won't the bots come out and heal Deconstructor immediately?" Nope. That's the beauty of this positioning. And maybe I'll be the one to bring this to Blizzard's attention so they fix it (lol.. like they're seriously reading my blog), but when Deconstructor is tanked close to the scrap piles on a side, neither one of those 2 piles will spawn adds.

Done it on 10-man. I've done it on 25-man. Both ways, you only have to deal with 2 piles of adds instead of 4. It makes the encounter much more trivial. PLUS... those slow bots have to walk all the way over to the other side before they can do anything. Trust me. You're gonna thank me for it.

Reputation Leveling: aka Argent Tournament Dailies

Another great side bonus of doing the Argent Tournament dailies is the crazy amount of reputation and gold you get from doing those quests. Assuming that you haven't gotten the Champion Title with all of the factions yet (which I don't think is possible just yet since it takes 5 days for each one) here's what you get:

• Each of the 4 daily quests for the home city that you're currently working on give 13g at level 80 and 250 reputation for that city, and 25% of that towards the other home cities.
• Each of the 4 daily Champion quests give you 250 Argent Crusade reputation, and either a Champion's Purse or Champion's Writ.

So, if you do these 8 dailies (2 sets of 2 can actually be done at the same time, so really it's more like 6), you get 1000 reputation for the city you're working for plus 250 reputation for all other cities, 1000 reputation for the Argent Crusade, 52g, 5 Champion Seals, and then either 40 more gold from the Purses (4 x 10g each) or another 1000 reputation plus 250 for other cities once you become champion if you get the Writs.

Let me sum it up another way:

Either up to 5000 total reputation and 52g - or up to 3000 total reputation and 92g.

At least those are the totals while you're working all for home city reps to Champion. Not sure what happens when you're Champion with everybody. Still, on the path there, you can get up to 100,000 reputation! (Don't check my math on that last one, I already know it's a bit off since you're not completing Champion Quests on your first path to Champion.) Oh, and that's about 1,000g as well. Granted, we're talking about 20 days of dailies, but since I still find them fun, I don't mind that as much.