FICS Game #1 w/ RockyRook

Played the first game (of hopefully 4) against RockyRook on FICS last night.  Grabbed the first pawn of many, making a horrific tactical error in the process.  I thought I was ok against the pin, but d4 wasn't the only square that White's queen could attack the knight from.  BAH.

Rocky missed it, and I showed my immense pawn-grabbing skills, totally ignoring my queenside development in the process.  I was able to lock up the kingside though so my king was safe, and eventually was ready to give up an exchange to completely develop (for like 4 pawns though, including a monster on c4.  Rocky let me extract my queen a different way which would have let my QB out without trouble, and then left a piece en-prise trying to save more pawns.

Time control was 75 minutes with a 15 sec. increment for each move.  I had the Black pieces.

Raid week: 6-5/6-11

Bleh week.

Dust: HWNN only got through Blackthorn - for some reason we didn't have nearly enough DPS for Spine (when we need Lust to get a tendon down in one shot, and barely at that - that's not good).  She got a Seal Trinket for her healing spec at least.

Jab2: GDKP run tried Morchok on heroic a few times.  Didn't kill it - we didn't have nearly enough healers for the first few attempts, then the Korchom-group kept dying.  (I was in the Morchok-group, and we were consistantly fine).  That, combined with a large pile of Ultraxion wipes only got us through Blackthorn as well.  Picked up the Tier Legs for 3500, got 4200 back at the end.

Nothing at all from LFR for those two, either. :(

Mashy: Ilvl 386 flower picker. *laugh*.

Token Alliance character: Went through LFR, got nada.

Upcoming Chess Stuff

Few games on the horizon:

Thurs. 6/14 on FICS vs RockyRook (see sidebar link).  75/15  I go as "Jabarii" on FICS.
Sat. 6/16 - 4 round USCF tournament, 55/5.  Don't know the sections yet as they wait on the entry pool before dividing it up.

Obviously will post all the games after they happen!

Raid Week 5/29-6/4

For each week raiding, the characters usually go as follows:
Dustweaver: Horde with No Name weekly raid + LFR.
Jabarii: Lazzy's GDKP run(*) + LFR.
Amashan: LFR (usually, not always)
Alliance Dust: LFR.


(*) Lazzy does a 25-man GDKP run every Sunday at 1:00 server that I've gotten in to for the past few weeks.  The way GDKP (aka: "gold run") works is that when stuff drops he runs an auction where people bid gold to buy the item - for these runs it's 3000G min and 500G raises.  It's an "out loud" auction, not silent.

At the end of the run (5:00 server, regardless of which boss you're on), all the gold collected is then split evenly among the raid members.  For his runs, Lazzy keeps an extra share (so it's split 26 ways instead of 25), but he provides Flasks and Feasts for everyone.  He also keeps the Maelstroms for everything not bid on.  It works surprisingly well, and the runs tend to go fairly smoothly as people that AFK or grief or are terrible players get kicked out so they don't get gold at the end - that's a great incentive to "play nice".


Not a bad week at all raiding.  Took Dust through on a 10-man PuG as the whole guild was playing D3 instead. *sigh*

Dustweaver: DPS Ring, Healer Belt
Jabarii: Tier Chest and Shoulders.  Paid 7000 for those, got 7200 back at the end.  Perfect!  Would have been better if DW didn't drop TWO of the stupid rogue daggers though, or if we'd had any Warriors at all so that the two Experimental Specimen Slicers and great trinkets went for more than 3k.
Amashan: Nothing that I remember.
Token alliance character: Finally got her LFR Maw.  About time!

Every good story starts in the middle...

... since nobody can go back to the beginning of time!

So we'll pick up with where I am now. This is going to track my random doings and thoughts on gaming, mostly with World of Warcraft and Chess (as those are what I'm playing at the moment). Will track what I'm doing of course (isn't that why everyone blogs?), but also post my thoughts about theory for both with an eye to generating discussion. I'll also likely touch on other games as the mood strikes.

At the moment, I'm a Class B chessplayer - current USCF rating is 1680, but it's a pretty "rusty" 1680 as I'm just picking the game up again after completely dropping it for nearly 20 years. Started back up about six months ago and am just now feeling like I remember something about how to play.

For WoW, I played Vanilla and BC, then missed WotLK and most of Cata, just re-starting that six months ago as well. I'm mainly on Kilrogg Horde, with a token alliance character on Gnomeregan. Guilded immediately with Horde with No Name as it has a bunch of old friends and co-workers and is a great group to boot.

I was originally going to play a Moonkin as my main as there weren't any spell-leather users in guild, but the spec just does terrible DPS so I switched to an Enhancement Shaman instead (even though we have 2 Hunters and a Resto Shaman in the 10-man). The Shaman is 5000% more fun, and almost 5000% more effective than the Moonkin is! So we'll pick up the story from here (or last week, in any case!)