Dkati will soon be immortalized...

Well, after months of sitting in a random lottery to get a chance at becoming a little statue, it has finally happened. Figure Prints has given me the opprotunity to turn Dkati into a little piece of art.

There were many interesting choices, and at $150 after shipping and tax, I took a good week to think about it. One of the largest decisions was which weapons should she wield? I haven't used daggers for ages, but Dkati grew up using them. But, the color in the daggers is much less than my swords (I have maces too.. but man, those are ugly...)

Ultimatly, I went with the daggers. I also chose to keep the helm on. It will be interesting to see if the statue finishers actually correct the hair that clips through the season 3 helm.

We'll see! I'm excited, and Dkati is too.

Kyi gets a new pet...

My druid alter-ego received a neato pet in the mail today.  Note the sexy Brutal Gladiator Leggings as well! Woot!

Dkati is a Challenger...

It's amazing! We actually achieved Challenger!

Now, this of course means we're "that team" that's in the 1500 bracket at the start of season who has "no business being there".

Man, we cursed those team out last season.

Bwahahhahahahahaa!

Dkati is still alive...

While I haven't posted in a long while now, I'm still alive and kicking. Here's a good synopsis of what has been happening in my corner of the world.

Hroda and I started our own little guild. We have, besides us, two other people, and we're 100% PvP focused. No drama, just a laid back attitude with no real structure. It's really nice.

In the arena, our 2v2 has been working hard to improve. And, after a couple of bad weeks, we seemed to be on fire this last week. When we called DPS switches during CC rotations, going for the kill, Hroda was on the ball... instantly dropping some massive damage. It was sexy.

For the first time ever, we ended above 1600 (1611 to be exact). And, while many will deem us scrubs still (and rightly so) we are very proud and happy. In fact, there's is a minuscule chance that we will get the "Challenger" title for season 3. We're not holding out breath though.

Dkati posts a test message...

This is a test of live writer with a picture!

Dkati giggles.... a lot...

This really needs no explanation. It makes me giggle a whole lot.

Credit to lolcat.com, of course.

Dkati gets some maces...

Sure,they may not be pointy and sharp, but I bet I'll have fun crushing warlock heads in!

 

Dkati Points to the Obvious...

With the Eye of the Storm weekend coming up, I ran across a nice post on the strategy that should be utilized.

The article is of decent length, but can be summarized into the following [what should be] obvious points:

1. Control at least 2 towers. If you're only holding one, stop doing everything else and get another tower.
2. Try to get 3 towers. If you can, get the fourth for the steamroll.
3. If you can't get three, stop banging your head against the opposing team's defense, and start controlling the middle for the flag runs.

I'd like to add that an important part of controlling 3 towers is to attack the fourth to preoccupy the horde from regrouping and sneaking out to get your other towers. Of course, you hopefully have a token defense on your other towers, at a minimum.

Likewise, and important part of controlling the middle is to apply some pressure to the horde's one or two towers. This keeps them from zerging the flag --- or one of your two towers.

If both teams follow this strategy, it comes down to who outplays the other team, or in some instances, who significantly out-gears the other team.

As an example of pure catastrophe for the alliance, if you're in a 2-tower-capped-control-the-flag mode, but the horde has a nice team of five, with supporting healers, and a wild mace-wielding-warrior-of-season-3-doom, and you don't have an equal defense.. they're gonna continually strip you of a tower, knocking you to one.

This has the effect of either (A) causing you to lose because you don't recap the tower, or (B) cause you to lose because you stopped controlling the middle to send 10 people to take on their 50-man-tower-capping-team.

So, you can take a third point of of this:

If you can get a coordinated, well-balanced, 5-man team into EotS, you'll probably win it for your team.

I've seen the horde execute this nicely.

Dkati goes HD with Stage6...

Having given up on YouTube because of it's horrible quality, I found Stage6 to be more receptive to large, high resolution files.

The amount of time it takes to buffer is rough, but the quality you gain is enormous.

Anyway, feel free to laugh very hard, because I had my inventory open the entire match! Honestly, I didn't even notice... I was too busy paying attention to the match... honestly!

Makes me feel awfully naked and exposed, since you now know exactly what's in my bags! Eeeep!

Dkati and the Illegal Danish

Seriously, I can't believe I'd never seen this. Yeah, yeah, they came out with #2 in this series, but this one is hilarious. The scene with where Rossi, the druid, and the paladin are on the start of their quest... holy crap. This is funny.

These guys should charge cash or have a contest to have a person's character make a cameo in a film.

[DivX web player stuff will need to be loaded for this video to work properly]

Dkati and Another Poor Quality Video...

I tell ya, I really have begun to hate YouTube.  Originally, I thought that my video compression selections were the cause of the poor look on YouTube.  However, YouTube samples things down quite a bit.

For example, this video looked awesome locally.  At full screen, it was nearly as good as watching the screen while it was happening live.  As you can see, it doesn't come anywhere close to that.

With that said, I think I've found a DivX based hosting site that we'll try in the future (I've already deleted the source AVI to this file).

Until then, enjoy this little fight where the druid played a horrible game, and allowed us to take down the fairly well geared warlock.  If they had both combined on my priest to begin with, it also would have gone differently.  But, I'll gladly take the points.

Dkati Takes Down Two Locks...

This week went a lot better in the arena for Hroda and me.  We had some decent matchups, but we also faced some strong teams.  As usual, the warrior/druid teams beat us up pretty bad (we went 50/50 against them), but we took down some better ranked teams to peak at about 1650 before we hit some skids.  [Note: when doing arena from a laptop, remember to plug it in, or you may find yourself kaput mid-fight!]

[A quick bitch. What's up with YouTube taking my beautiful 1080p encoded video and making it so ugly. I think I'll need to look into warcraftmovies.com.]

One of our fights was a career highlight for me!  We entered the arena to see two warlocks with their fel-puppies out. They were playing aggressively and came running.  They spotted Hroda early, who let out a fear immediately, but not before she was loaded up with dots and gets blasted.

Meanwhile, I was scooting my stealthed butt (at stealthed speed) after one of the 'locks.  Hroda dies, and I finally nabbed my target warlock behind a pillar and made really quick work of him.  His buddy figures out where I'm at, and he begins curse of exhaustion kiting into a fear.  I'm pretty sure he can finish me at this point but instead of staying aggressive, he runs away from me. 

I take the time to dive behind a pillar, hoping to outwait the dots for a quick bandage + stealth.  This doesn't work as we realizes I'm going to try that.  With combo points in hand, I pillar hump until I can put a snare on him.  At that point, it's game over as my damage will out do his slow dots.

I even had another Cloak of Shadows waiting which I didn't use (a mistake, on my part).

It was good fun, and to get 22 points on it, I was thrilled. I'm sure those warlocks were pissed.  Luck? Probably. Fun? Oh yeah.

Dkati and the Pains of Arena...

Since season 3 had started, our 2v2 has really struggled to stay above 1500.  It seems we're up against very prime comp teams, and a whole lot of them are running around with "rival", "challenger" or even "gladiator" titles!

What is more painful, is our new 3v3.  2xrouge + disc priest.  I would think we should be able to at least hold our own through the scrub brackets.  But, even at a 1350 ranking! (youch, I know!) we're seeing challenger teams.

Are these teams hiring help to get their scores up? Or, is the beginning of the season really just THAT brutal??

I don't have any answers.  I know that my 2v2 was doing better last season though.  Scrubs? Yes, we really are. But, I didn't expect this type of pain this season.

I'll just have to wait for the end of the season when we get an influx of people srubbier than us. Maybe, just maybe, we'll have a chance... maybe??

Dkati Actually beats a Paladin...

In our 2v2 [Fast and Danger!], Hroda and I had a really off night.

However, we finished the night off with a pretty good outlast match where we faced a paladin/rogue team.

Luckily, I had my capture program running for this one, so here it is!

Yes, I still click a few of my buttons.. me nub!

Dkati and Hroda face a Shaman/Warlock Combo

And, it had to be some of the funniest matches we'd seen.

The first round, I totally botched the whole thing and they won fairly easily.  The second match, I killed the lock rather quickly, but the shammy (elemental) also focused on me, so I died shortly after the takedown.

For the next 20 minutes, the shaman and Hroda played pillar-hump.  Horda had managed to mana burn him into oblivion, but the humping (helped with the snare totem) allowed him to keep running until he could heal.  Eventually, with both at full mana, Hroda baited him out with an attempt to resurrect me.  This ended with the shaman's massive burst DPS taking down Hroda who couldn't find a nearby pillar.

In the final match, I opened in the same manner, killed the warlock faster but couldn't get to my healer, or around a pillar, before some lightning roasted my ass.

Pillar humping started again.  However, we could tell the shaman was looking to rez his lock buddy.

Hroda and I made the call for him to come and rez me at the same time.  Hroda popped an immediate heal on me, I stealthed and sprinted right to the lock, who went down in 2 hits, since they hadn't been healed.  Game was over at this point when I had full health and simply stunned and slapped that shaman down.

I've never seen a resurrection in arena -- but both teams did it simultaneously.

Hilarious!

Dkati is Queen of the Ogres...

After not doing the Ogri'la quests forever, I finally managed to tag along with some friends.  Low and behold, at the end of the quest, you become king (or in my case queen) of the Ogres! Bow you stinky dogs! Bow to your evil queen! Bwahahahahahahaha!

Dkati gets a Big Upgrade...

And, while the new armor is a HUGE upgrade, most of the rest of the PVP'ing world did the same thing.  If nothing else, my survivability has gone up as I've gained a whole lot of HP and jump almost 200 resilience.

Of course, I'm dead evil looking now.  Here's a list of all the fun toys I received:

• Vengeful Gladiator's Leather Helm
• Merciless Gladiator's Leather Spaulders
• Gladiator's Leather Tunic
• Gladiator's Leather Gloves
• Gladiator's Leather Legguards
• Vindicator's Band of Triumph
• Bold Ornate Ruby
• Inscribed Ornate Topaz

All in all, a very large chunk of stuff.  That's what 75k honor, and about 3200 arena points will net you if you spend them all in one day!

Dkati Increases her 2v2 ranking, again...

Hroda and I have been slowly gaining in the arena.  We would have made it to 1650-1700, but we lost to a horribly ranked hunter/warlock combo.

We really shouldn't have lost, but the new hunter abilities to "mortal strike" and rip off buffs seemed to really hurt.  We have always had some issues with trying to keep beast master hunters off of her.

The hunter was actually a very capable kiter and gave me some issues.

The good news is, I seriously believe that the 31/30 (AR/Prep) build won us at least one game.  However, it plays a whole heck of a lot like a deep combat build.  This helped as I've got the combos down in that build, and this one actually makes it a little easier.

It'll be hard choosing which set of weapons I'll get with Season 3 (whether it be S3 weapons or S2 weapons, depending on if we get the ranking or not!).

Dkati and her Druidic Friend Kyi...

My druid Kyi (pronounced: KEEEEEEEEEEEEEY) turned the big 40.  And, in doing so, she successfully became a BOOOOOOOOOMKIN!  The dance is so silly, that I grabbed a picture of the hip thrusting maneuver.  Hilarious stuff!

Technorati Tags: Dkati Druid World of Warcraft

Dkati has a good PvP week...

Our 2v2 team, Fast and Danger had a good week. We lost 3 times, and won 7.

However, those 3 losses came to teams that had a holy paladin with 14k armor and +1600 to healing. We simply aren't geared enough to blast through that kind of healing (plus bubbles). This is even with their partner being a scrub in mostly greens.

I hate that people can "sell" their services to bring on crappy people that don't want to win on even terms. It's crap to go up against a 1500 team that's manned with fully geared and talented people. Hopefully some of that will subside next season, but it's bound to continue.