Duct Tape and a Prayer

According to the last poll, 75% of you wouldn’t pay for a WOW guide under any conditions, 12% would if the preview were good, 6% would if the guide’s author were authoritative, and 6% would if the author were authoritative and the preview were good. That’s about the mix I expected. Thank you!

New poll, because I’ve been thinking about which characters I’m going to drop in favor of worgen once the expansion drops. Right now I’m going with my warrior and my warlock; I would have done a worgen druid, but let’s face it, you’re not going to actually see worgen form, ever, if you’re a druid, so why not just work on the night elf druid I already have?

Anyway, now I want your opinions! Which classes are you going to roll once the expansion drops?

Read more…

Because I’m curious!

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The RSS2 feed is working again. This means that if you had subscribed to this blog’s feed but were not seeing my posts in your favorite blog reader, you should be seeing them again. If you’re not seeing them, please leave me a note.

If you are following me on Twitter, and if you have logged on at just the right times, you may be aware that my wife has started a business providing copywriting and consulting services to small businesses. She wants to work with bloggers, designers, and other creative types – especially people who run handcrafting businesses, of the type you’d find on Etsy.

At the moment, she’s running a holiday giveaway: she’s giving out two one-hour consulting sessions, where she’ll go over the presentation of your site and your web copy and help you figure out how to draw more readers and get the readers you do have to stick around more (and, if you’re selling something, to buy more of what you’re selling). There’s no obligation on your part – all you have to do is head over to this post and leave a comment, and you’re entered into the drawing. The deadline for entering is 11:59 PM EST this Saturday, so head over and leave a comment.

(It is possible that you are now saying “but Chris, what can a copywriter do for me?” I could respond in a number of ways, from listing generic benefits to actually going to your site and giving some pointers, but the bottom line is this: if you go comment on that post, it costs you nothing to find out what a copywriter can do for you!)

There is no particularly good way to make this long story short, so I’ll just be my usual terse self. For a variety of reasons, I am taking my leave of the internet and of computers in general for the next two weeks. I’ll have email – so no shenanigans! – but otherwise I’m going dark. Have fun, and do all the things I wouldn’t do!

Since this also happens to be post #100, you may feel free to treat it as an open thread. What’s on your mind?

I’m trying to get threaded comments and editable comments working nicely together. It’s not going well. If anyone has any suggestions, I welcome them.

In the meantime, here’s a comment topic for you, in honor of 3.3’s new Need Before Greed system: what’s your favorite piece of “wrong” gear – gear that’s not in your “optimal” armor class but that you can still wear, and that you prefer to wear over the available gear that is “optimal”?

• how to play a priest: I would never dictate how you should play a priest. That said, I have a series of guides in the works that might be helpful.
• glyph of penance: Reduces the cooldown of Penance by 2 seconds. The recipe for this Glyph comes out of the inscription books dropped by Northrend bosses, and as such, the price can be relatively steep compared to other glyphs.
• discipline haste cap: 433 Haste Rating. You get 6% from Enlightenment and 25% from Borrowed Time. With Borrowed Time up, your GCD will be pushed down to 1 second, which is the farthest it will go.
• discipline priest best in slot and best disc priest gear: There are various schools of thought on that. I’ll try to post a list of my favorites among the current gear sometime this week.
• divine aegis: A shield that procs on a critical heal. It’s the “3D bubble” effect. Shields for up to 30% of the amount healed, stacks up to 10k damage absorbed. I still don’t know if it’s 10k total for a given aegis (if the total amount shielded reaches 10k, DA has to fall off before more crits will increase the amount shielded again) or 10k at any given time.
• discipline priest trinkets: You probably want Solace of the Defeated and Solace of the Fallen if you’re raiding endgame content.
• haste soft cap food: As above, the softcap is 433. You can bring that down to 393 if you want to use buff food like Imperial Manta Steak or Very Burnt Worg.

Actually, there’s one more I want to touch on:

• holy priest prayer of healing vs holy nova: POH is a more mana-efficient spell, and you can target it – Holy Nova is centered around you and doesn’t have as much range. But HN is instant; use it in a pinch, but not as one of your main healing spells. (Tip: Use Holy Nova in heroic Nexus when Grand Magus Telestra is throwing you around the room. You’ll heal your party and damage the boss!)

You may be aware that for the last couple weeks, I’ve been fighting a script-injection infection on etherjammer.com. Last weekend was the third in a row that I’d been infected, and I finally got annoyed enough to nuke the site to the ground. Nothing left except directories. I even destroyed the hidden files.

Today I’m finally bringing things back online.

You may notice some quirks as the blog reasserts itself. Things may not be as you remember them – I kept the posts and comments but couldn’t save the blog settings, so I’m reworking it from memory, and from changed tastes. I’ll be back in posting trim here soon enough. For now, I’m happy enough that I’m back at all.

Every other year, Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger runs a mini-workshop on blogging, called 31 Days to Build a Better Blog. This year I’ve decided to participate, for both Duct Tape and Lost in Translation.

Day 1 of 31DBBB is Write an Elevator Pitch: a 30-second/150-word description of what the blog’s about. I was having trouble with this until I ran into a serendipitous error. Last week, I switched the address of this blog from http://www.etherjammer.com/wowblog/ to http://ducttape.etherjammer.com/; the ducttape. subdomain points at the /wowblog/ directory, so I didn’t think there would be any problem. Turns out, though, that some functions in WordPress rely on the address in the URL bar of your browser being correct to work properly; in particular, going to /wowblog/ just doesn’t work anymore – WordPress throws a 404 error! (Going to subpages, like /wowblog/feed/ to pick a random example out of the air, throws an Internal Server Error, which is even more fun.)

This isn’t a shaggy dog story, I promise. See, when you get the 404 error page from /wowblog/, you can click on the “go back to the main page” button at the bottom to get to ducttape., which solves the problem. But for some reason, this unsets the cookie that my What Would Seth Godin Do? plugin uses, and so I started seeing the tag at the top of the blog again.

In the WWSGD tag, as it happens, is an elevator pitch for Duct Tape and a Prayer.

Reproduced here, then, for your reading pleasure: the Elevator Pitch!

Welcome to Duct Tape and a Prayer, a World of Warcraft blog focusing on priests and healing, with occasional tangents into other classes and facets of World of Warcraft. In this place, in the words of Dr. Horrible, the status is not quo; my opinions can, do, and will differ from conventional wisdom, and I’ll do my best to back them up where I can. I welcome comments and discussion, but if you’re the sort of person who starts sentences with “Obviously…” or believes that there’s a One True Way to play the game, you might not be in the right place.

I’m considering a new site icon for this blog. Would you please tell me what you think of this?