Duct Tape and a Prayer

If by “lore” you mean what the developers mean, which is “the background and history on which the story of World of Warcraft is built”, then nothing is happening to the lore and the story is just progressing.

If, however, by “lore” you mean “the things about the current game that I like”, then yes, Cataclysm may well “ruin and destroy the lore”.

Guys, they’re not ruining lore any more than the second book in a series ruins the first book. Chill out.

I’ve stopped raiding.

Don’t get me wrong – I love raiding, and I really like the group I’ve been raiding with. But right now, my son just came back from his summer in California and has started school (he’s in 5th grade this year – I can barely believe it), my wife is going back to being a full-time student (to finish an English/Business degree), and I’m working 50 to 60 hours a week (and that doesn’t include the time I’m spending training up on work-related skills). Plus, we have a new dog who needs to go out regularly. All of that comes together to put me in a situation in life where I really can’t put together three or four uninterrupted hours at the times when my guild raids.

Because I feel guilty about not raiding, I’ve been avoiding playing my priest – I think I’ve been in the new 5-man all of three times (not for lack of trying – someone else always gets to the healing spots first), and of the new raid I only ever saw Northrend Beasts. I’m kind of tired of dailies, and I don’t do heroics (for a lot of reasons – one being that as a healer, I’m the one who’s going to take the blame, deserved or not, if the group fails). Instead, I’ve put a lot of time into my rogue alt (she’s level 44 now – I’m averaging about a level a day for the last two weeks), since I can play her in little bits. (Heirloom shoulders, chest, and dagger mean she’s doing just over 100 DPS and getting 120% XP from killing and quests, so I’m cruising right along. I’ve been out of rested XP since level 27…)

I try to log on to Theande and Sisuphe once a day to transmute and do the Jewelcrafting daily, respectively, but I don’t always remember, and I’m running out of green Northrend gems to feed the daily – and I really don’t want to have to fly around Storm Peaks two dozen times gathering ore again. (I know, I bought Sisuphe’s epic flyer so she could do exactly that, but I do my best farming when I can play uninterrupted and, as above, I don’t really get uninterrupted time these days. That’s one of the reasons I love my rogue – if I have to step away, I can just stealth in a corner until I get back.)

I am happy about most of the changes in 3.2 (the Penance cooldown was a nerf, and honestly we should have taken the +5% crit they offered us in exchange in 3.1), and I’m really looking forward to the reworked Onyxia in 3.3 and to Cataclysm. But otherwise – well, I don’t really have very much to say about WOW right now, I think.*

All of which is to say that I’m sorry posts have been thin on the ground here lately, and I don’t know when I’m coming back.

* Yes, I’m consciously invoking this in order to kick-start my creative brain. Don’t tell it that, though, or it won’t work.

In Naxxramas, one of the bosses, Heigan the Unclean, casts a debuff on everyone within 30 yards called “Spell Disruption“, which slows casting speed by 300% (effectively, your spells take four times as long to cast). Normally, this is a bad thing (although it doesn’t affect instant-cast spells).

However, Shadow priests can take advantage of this debuff. Spell Disruption increases the channeling time of channeled spells like Mind Flay, and also increases the spaces between ticks, so that, for example, a spell like Penance, which ticks once a second for two seconds (three ticks – 0s, 1s, 2s), will instead tick once every four seconds for eight seconds (0s, 4s, 8s).

Here’s the bug: Mind Flay does have its channeling time increased fourfold, from 3 seconds to 12 seconds – but for some reason, the tick frequency is unchanged. Where Mind Flay does damage every second for 3 seconds without the debuff, it now does damage every second for 12 seconds with the debuff. You’re getting four times as much damage for the same mana cost, making Mind Flay possibly the most mana-efficient damage-dealing spell in the game while under the effects of Spell Disruption.