18 Flights in March - Exalted with Korean Air

It has been a while since I made a post... I feel that I will ramble a bit here. First, off I have never flown so much in my life... 18 flights in one month, three times to Japan, three times to the states... my average speed for the month was over 100kmp!

One on of these trips I had to make a round trip from Seoul to Los Angeles where I landed at 8am and left again the same day at midnight! Back and across the Pacific on the same day. On this trip I tried to get Korean Air at LAX to give me a free upgrade to business (I didn' have enough miles available at the moment) but I had already accumulated over 500,000 miles on Korean. So it turns out that despite all of these miles, and despite purchasing 3 round trips in a single month and despite buying the chocolate and cookies for the LAX staff that a friend of mine recommended and despite there being 5 open seats in business (and 1st completely open) the LAX Korean Air staff told me that they could not do a free upgrade. They rationally explained that if they did this they would sell less business seats.

I gotta tell you that getting to Exalted with Korean Air turns out to be a totally worthless reputation grind, I do not recommend it.

First time to SXSW, it was a pleasant trip and I enjoyed the panel that I was on... was amazed at the number of vendors for all kinds of crap from video editing to SEO who all bought a console and a TV and were running Rock Band to make their booth more sticky and to increase user retention.

I missed Kyoto's Cherry blossom season by about 7 days. Got to see just the beginnings of the trees blooming at it was already very beautiful. Unfortunately it was just Kang and I hanging out there walking down the river with a romantic rain and nothing to do but talk about business. We ended up finding a tasty yakitori pub and getting some good draft beer, but still it was wrong.

Today it finally has some sun here in Seoul, from October 15th to now April it has been cold. Sometimes rainy and cold, or snowy and cold, or more often just plain cold. But today it was my kind of t-shirt weather, others are not yet ready for t-shirts, but I am an optimist and I have got to be out in the sun and get some air.

After all of this travel I finally got some down time this past weekend and played a lot of PvP WoW with Mike, my wife, my son and so on. Our characters are really beginning to crank up the resilience now. I have 439 resilience, Mike is behind me at 410, and Kaiwen my wife is at 380! We are now steadily winning in Arena and we just mop up the ally in the battlegrounds.

In fact, last Sunday night I killed more ally in a single session than I ever had: 1,000 people in 4 hours. I just gotta tell you that after a bunch of travel and meetings and so on, that on the whole a large beer and a thousand dead ally feels actually very good. The way that I was able to rack up that many kills is due to the changes in Alterac Valley (AV) on the latest 2.4 patch.

Map of Alterac Valley

I am fascinated by watching all of the point releases and constant fixes to AV that Blizzard keeps trying. It is a beautiful concept of 40 Horde vs 40 Ally vying to kill the other side's general. The latest changes eliminate the diminishing returns honor nerf, and pushes the Horde starting cave way back, and a bunch of other minor tweaks that over all nerfed the Horde.

The result is that Mike, Kaiwen and I played 3 AVs on Saturday and lost all 3 and nobody felt good about that. We three are all 25/36/0 SL/SL affliction warlocks and we normally do very well in BGs, but it is frustrating to have 5 to 8 AFKers and just the general disorganizing of a bunch of people all going off on random kills without any strategic value. So I thought about it for a while I and I decided to really give Rain of Fire a solid try...

Rain of Fire is a horribly mana expensive Area of Effect (AoE) spell that I have never found any real good use for previously except for clearing the area around the Ally flag in Warsong Gulch (WSG). The problem with it is that you go through mana like a mage with half intellect, and the damage causes a lot of aggro action from PVE so it is no good there except for small trash, and in PVP people are smart enough to walk away from a rain of meteors that come down on top of their heads.

But in AV now (post 2.4) there are these great clashes of 25+ vs. 25+ at either Frostwolf Graveyard or more rarely on the Ally bridge just past the Stormpike Graveyard. With these big clashes, melee classes smash into each other on the front lines while the casters and hunters try to pile on big DPS on those tanks, and the healers on both sides keep up the tanks. It usually just grinds on and on, and at least in our Korean battlegroup we unfortunately usually have many AFKers... so on Saturday we got ground up to pieces at Frostwolf.

But Sunday I brought out Rain of Fire with a vengance... rather than sit back with the other casts and toss out the 3 instant cast affliction DOTs like candy (as I would in Arena). This time I moved up to just the second row of tanks - a pikeman's spot if you will and instead of putting rain of fire on the melee action instead I put the happy green ring right on the front steps of the ally casters that are so nicely in a bunch.

It was so freakin' satisfying... it was like a mowing grass (ally)... these casters would crumple with just one or two channels of fire, and then without healing support their own melee would also crumple at the same time and we would be able to take great big bites of territory back. Since I have tried this I have won 4 AVs! Many times marching the allies all the way from Frostwolf to Stormpike and I know it was the Rain of Fire... why? Because a few times I would just get a little sparky and adventurous and instead of concentrating on the mass killing I would get distracted with the odd hunter, mage or warlock who was sniping from an interesting flank position and go after them oblivious to the 10 debuffs ticking away my health (got to say that 439 resilience is amazing - you feel like superman with bullets and swords bouncing off your chest and rogues are no big deal anymore).... so anyways when I died and came back after 30 to 45 seconds, I found that the allies were consistently able to roll that front line way back towards Frostwolf each time my Rain of Fire was out of play...

Anyways it is all good murderous fun by all...

Cheers, -Erik

Originally posted on LiveJournal