Casual Huntering

Archive for the ‘News’ Category

So, I woke up at 3am with one of the most annoying things in the world, heartburn hiccups. Yeah, could that sound any worse??

Just imagine a bad painful case of the hiccups that you get a little burst of indigestion with each hick. Hurts like hell. (and consequently – completely deserved – that’s what I get for eating mint Oreo cookies right before I go to bed.) So, I scrabbled half awake stumbling for the kitchen for my cure of the hiccups, a spoonful of peanut butter. Seriously, works every time for me. (well, almost – it didn’t work when I was drugged up after getting my wisdom teeth yanked out – that was a miserable day of hiccups – hopefully never to be repeated). I really need to start eating healthy and exercising, but you see the only time I have to really exercise is when I play WoW in the morning. I better figure something or buy a lot of peanut butter.

Anyway, on to something more important:

So, I was looking at the patch notes for Cataclysm Beta, wow, they still have a lot of work to do. All hunter Lock pets were deleted because of data corruption, their attempting to have people stream the game instead of downloading the new patch (must be huge), and the level cap is only 83 at this point in time among other things.

Here are some of the things that I noticed categorized by classes that I care about:

Hunters

• Five pets can now be stored with the hunter at all times. Any one of these five pets can be summoned via the Call Pet ability.

• Focus has replaced mana as a new resource.

• Hunters now start with a pet at level 1.

• The Stable will now store 20 pets. If a pet is moved into the Stable, its talents are wiped.

• Ammo has been removed from the game.

I’m so stoked. This is freakin’ awesome!!!! They said at this point, if you put a pet in the stable then it’s talents will get wiped. That’s annoying. Oh, and I’m not sad at all the ammo is leaving.  Well, that’s not entirely true, I really wish they would have did to ammo what they did to throwing weapons, make it so  you only had to buy one of them, then they could have done some cool bonuses to them, but whatever, at least I won’t ever run out in a raid again.

I’m already getting a list of pets that I’m going to go tame the second Cataclysm comes out. I’ll have to post that sometime soon.

Warlocks

• Soul Shards have been removed from the game as items. Instead, they now exist as a resource system necessary for using, or altering the mechanics of certain spells.

Warlocks everywhere will cheer out loud for this. I’m so sick of having soul shards take up so much bag space with my level 60 warlock (and yes I’m still working on getting his flower picking skills up, I’m almost to 300 – yes I know my life is boring, but what can you do?).

Death Knights

• A dedicated tanking tree has been implemented.

• The way in which runes recharge has changed.

Looks like I’m going to have to relearn how to play that Death knight with all the changes coming through there.

Paladins

• We are in the process of overhauling many paladin talents, spells and abilities. Expect updates in upcoming patches.

Okay, so I only have a baby Paladin, but I’m going to start paying more attention to the class. Apparently, everything is going to change anyway (again).

Druids

• A new Eclipse mechanic has been added for druids. The feature is functional, but the interface art is still a work in-progress.

I honestly don’t know what’s going on with druids, but I love the class. I heard they’re changing something with the tree form. I still think the tree form should change with the seasons of the year. You know have lots of leaves in the summer, have them slowly change color and fall off in the fall, look dead in the winter and start to blossom in the spring. How cool would that be!! Seriously! But really, I got my druid up to level 60, but I skipped 20 levels thanks to RAF, so I don’t have a clue as to what’s going on with that class.

So, there you have it, I really should get back to work and try to get something done here for once in my life. I’m really trying to make an effort to put more posts out there. I enjoy writing, but life just keeps getting in the way.

Who said you wouldn’t be able to use your WoW skills in real life?? This website recently reported a boy who used his WoW skills in order to save his sisters life. Do I know anything about the validity of the site… um, no. But I love the concept so I don’t care.

Apparently a 12 year old kid in Norway and his sister ran into a not so happy Moose in the woods near their home. The moose was a little upset and this kid knew exactly what to do. To get the attention off of his sister he “taunted” the aggro away (not that hunter’s have a taunt other than their distracting shot – maybe he growled at the moose), then once his sister was safe he used his hunter skill “feign death” clearing all aggro at that point. Luckily the moose didn’t resist his spell thus preventing a wipe.

Makes me wonder what other skills we could use in real life. Man, I want to go tame some wild beast, or shoot a fireball with my hands. I think I’m going to go work on that for my Friday project…. hmm…. how could I blink like a mage? ……/lost in thought

[Nettavisen via Wired Blogs]

So, what else do we WoW bloggers have to do on patch day when the servers are down? Of course we talk about… the patch. So, patch 3.3.3 actually has a lot of stuff to it, and you’ve probably already read, memorized, changed your macros, changed your class, yada yada yada. But I’m going to post it anyway. Oh, by the way this doesn’t have the entire 3.3.3 patch notes, I tend to skip the classes that I’m not playing. Actually, up to this point I’d only comment on Hunters and Death Knights, but I’ve been playing my druid more (even if she’s only level 38). So, I’ve added the druid changes as well (even though at this point I won’t have a clue as to what the heck they mean). For the full patch 3.3.3 notes go to blizz’s website. Now, my list is getting shorter because of technical issues. I was using Word format, but it was eating my text, so we’re going to do something different, but we’re running out of time.

Classes: General

Several raid buffs have had their ranges increased to 100 yards, up from 45 yards, to prevent select buffs from repeatedly getting applied and removed during highly mobile encounters. Some buffs, such as paladin auras, totems, shouts and Blood Pact are intentionally meant to have shorter ranges and remain unchanged.

Seems like the buffs we would have liked to have increased their ranged didn’t.

Hunters

Talents

• Beast Mastery

Ferocious Inspiration: This ability is now an aura and provides 1/2/3% damage to all party or raid members within 100 yards and boosts the damage of Steady Shot by 3/6/9%

• Pet Talents

Heart of the Phoenix: Cooldown reduced to 8 minutes, down from 10 minutes.

I’ve already typed a big long paragraph on this, and then it was eaten by bad Word formatting. I’m too impatient to try again. Lets just say, yay for BM!

Death Knights

Icy Touch: This ability now causes a very high amount of threat while the death knight is in Frost Presence.

Chains of Ice: The ability now innately applies Frost Fever to a target.

Rune of Razorice: Now stacks 5 stacks of 2% Frost Vulnerability instead of 10 stacks of 1% Frost Vulnerability. Proc chance changed to 100%.

Talents

Blood

• Abomination’s Might: This effect is now passive instead of being a proc on certain strikes. Rank 1 is 5% attack power and Rank 2 is 10% attack power. The self strength buff remains unchanged.
• Will of the Necropolis: There is no longer a cooldown on the frequency at which this talent can be activated. In addition, this ability can now also be triggered by damage which deals less than 5% of your health.

Frost

• Endless Winter: No longer causes Frost Fever to be applied by Chains of Ice, but instead grants 2/4% strength.
• Icy Talons: The personal haste benefit provided by this talent is no longer exclusive with other sources of melee haste. This will allow death knights to always swing 4/8/12/16/20% faster when Frost Fever is applied. Windfury Totem and the party/raid component of Improved Icy Talons still do not stack.
• Improved Icy Talons: This effect is now passive instead of being a proc. The self haste buff remains unchanged.
• Nerves of Cold Steel: Now increases off-hand damage by 8/16/25%, up from 5/10/15%.
• Unbreakable Armor: The amount of strength granted is now 20%, up from 10%.

Unholy

• Scourge Strike: Now deals 70% weapon damage, plus 12% of physical damage done as shadow damage for each of the death knight’s diseases on the target. The net result should be larger strikes with no diseases present, while maximum damage with all diseases applied to the target should stay the same.
• Unholy Blight: In addition to its previous effects, this talent now also prevents diseases from being dispelled from victims afflicted by Unholy Blight.

I’m still trying to learn the DK class. I’m now dual speced as an unholy DPSer and a Frost tank. I know frost isn’t thee best tanking spec, but for what I want to do its pretty awesome. I’m only tanking 5 mans at this point, and I’m only doing that with my friends and family until I’m comfortable. In LFG I’m playing dps. My gear still sucks pretty bad at this point.

Druids

Nature’s Grasp: Now has 3 charges, up from 1.

Talents

Balance

• Starfall: The damage done by this spell has been significantly increased.
• Typhoon: Mana cost reduced to 25%, down from 32%.

Feral Combat

• Mangle: The debuff from this talent now lasts 60 seconds, up from 12 seconds.

I honestly don’t know what any of this means yet. I know I like my feral kitty druid. I love sneaking up on mobs and pouncing. But past that at this point I’m clueless.

I was going to add a lot more, but I was having some issues and I’m running out of time. I really should have started getting ready to go to work like 3 minutes ago. There are several things they are doing with this patch that will make my life so much easier. I love the fact that holiday bosses are now being added to the dungeon finder. I’ll actually do those bosses daily now, that and the summoning criteria has gone down. And you can’t do it more than once a day anyways, so that will make my life easier on holidays.

Engineering pets are no longer bind on pick up, that’s nice and annoying. I like my engineering profession, I don’t want to share it, but I’m not a goblin engineer, and I want the little bomb pet. So, what do you do?

Its nice to see dungeon finder get a little more refined. I always hated it when someone was voting to boot a player and I had no idea why. Overall they’re making it a little cleaner.

Seems like a lot of features that blizzard only recently added are being cleaned up, like the dungeon finder and the quest tracker and such. Plus we’re getting nifty random battlegrounds, and such. Should be fun to play with tonight. What I still want to know is …. where is my moose?? /shakes fist at ghostcrawler.

There was another Q&A twitter session recently. It was very enlightening. I wanted to talk about some of the points that we discussed, but I’m definitely not going to go over the entire session. Go here if you would like to read it in its entirety.

Hunter (Of course I have to start with the hunter stuff.)

Q. The Hunter class has many odd and situational abilities such as Mongoose Bite and Aspect of the Beast – are there any plans for changes to these types of abilities?

A. Mongoose Bite is most likely a goner. Let us weep. We think Aspect of the Beast could have some cool uses for Beastmaster hunters.

I really hope that Beastmasters will be a viable raid spec again someday. /crosses fingers

Q. Are hunters likely to see more stable slots for their pets in the future? With the current variety of pets, the amount they have right now seems too small.

A. Arm-waving here, but a model I would love to see is dramatically expanded slots (so you can store all those Spirit Beasts) but have a smaller number of “active” pets, like 3. You could summon an active pet from anywhere in the world, when outside of combat. You would swap a pet from active to the stable at the Stable Masters.

This is a great idea!! I mean really do you use more than 3 pets at a time anyway? We always have several pets that we just can’t manage to say good bye to, and … who would ever say adios to a Spiritbeast for goodness sake. I think this isn’t such a bad idea. I hope it happens.

Death Knight (My only other level 80 character is a DK at this point, I’m enjoying the class thoroughly).

Q. Two-handed (2H) frost death knights was a really fun playstyle that died when dual-wielding (DW) was introduced. Are there any plans to make using two-handed weapons more appealing?

A. We can’t make every death knight tree PvP, PvE and tanking viable and also offer both 2H and DW options for all three of those. We are currently designing Frost as a DW-only tree.

Right now my death knight is a 2 handed frost spec tank and 2 handed unholy spec dps. Why?  Because I haven’t picked up one handed weapons yet, but I totally want to dual wield with my frost tank. I won’t say more to further demonstrate my noobness when it comes to this subject.

Raids & Dungeons (I admit I have skipped a lot of the questions here.)

Q. What have you learned from this expansion’s emblem system?

A. Having that many different kind of emblems is overwhelming. In hindsight, we wish we had done maybe 2 emblems: the current tier and the previous tier (Frost and Triumph at the moment). They also felt a tad too grindy when 3.3 first came out before all of the sources of emblems were available.

I’m glad that they are simplifying this; it was a bit too overwhelming, confusing, and complicated previously. I don’t’ want them to make it so simple that its almost stupid, but I think 2 tiers are enough.

Q. Are there any plans to allow cross-realm raiding?

A. If we can solve the problems with it, we might give it a try. One of the problems is getting the group back together, especially on the longer instances. Loot drama and stuff like that is always a problem. There is also the ongoing concern about the concept of your realm having less of a sense of community.

I personally don’t see how this can end up being a good thing. Our raid group does some puging for ToC 25, but they have a “good list” and a “bad list”. With random, you get what you get. There just seems for too much coordination that needs to take place and too much time required. With that being said, I think it would make raiding more accessible to someone who doesn’t have a raiding guild or don’t have enough people to do 25 mans. I agree about the loss of the community feel though. I’m all over pugs for 5 man, but this looks like it could go sour.

Q. Will we be seeing more Caverns of Time in Cataclysm? War of the Ancients, maybe?

A. We will definitely see another trip to the Caverns of Time during Cataclsym. You are going to have to ask Chromie for more details though. =)

I love Caverns of Time dungeons, the lore, the story line, the chance to go back in time, it’s all epic in my opinion. I’m glad they are doing that in Cataclsym.

Q. Why have we not seen World Bosses in this expansion?

A. They just have problems. It’s always a race to get to them, which tends to favor larger groups who are online often, and it’s hard to discourage or even prevent players outside the raid from helping or screwing things up.

A#2. World bosses are something that we have been talking about more as of late. We really like the concept, but there are certain design problems we would like to address before we bring them back. Stay tuned.

I’ve been wondering about this myself. I thought it was cool having random world bosses in different areas. (don’t go over there if you don’t want to be eaten by a dragon **head nod**). I remember leveling and visiting the center of Darkshire only to be quickly killed by the large dragon there. I didn’t like dying much, but it was cool to see it. But I see the problem here; I wouldn’t have a chance being as casual as I am with my play time. I’m a little curious what they plan on doing.

Q. With the advent of Heroic Shadowfang Keep and Heroic Deadmines, is there any likelihood of other older instances made Heroic?

A. Yes. We are hoping to do more than just these two, but it just comes down to time. We are focusing on getting the new Cataclysm dungeons done first and then we can look into doing more old-world Heroics.

I’m so stupid; I thought that it was odd that they were only doing Shadowfang keep and Deadmines. That will be awesome; with new patches will get new old school heroic dungeons. What more could you ask for??

Cataclysm (not everything, just the questions that interested me).

Q. Regarding Cataclysm, can you reveal any of the ‘major changes’ in Blasted Lands and how this will affect the lore?

A. I love the fact that one of our first questions is in regards to the Blasted Lands! We have big plans in store for this zone in Cataclysm. We will be revamping the entire flow of the zone so you can expect an entirely new experience here. Some of the big changes include an opening to the coastline for a new play area, as well as a large new worgen area in The Tainted Scar.

You know, I don’t think I did anything in the Blasted Lands except go through the portal to the outlands, maybe I should check it out before the expansion. (I probably won’t).

Q. Should players be concerned about what gear they pickup in this expansion, because of the gear overhaul that is coming?

A. I wouldn’t stress over it. You’ll probably replace that gear pretty quickly. Since we have 5 levels, we don’t really want players getting all the way to 85 without having upgraded at all.

Yeah, of course a gear reset is coming. Kind of makes me want to work on alts instead of my main for the next few months.

Q. With the Lich King defeated, in Cataclysm, will the Plaguelands be green and beautiful again?

A. Western Plaguelands will finally be free of the plague in Cataclysm. It’s hard for the Scourge to survive without their beloved Lich King. I guess this means we need to rename the zone?

I love it; I always thought the place was kind of ugly anyway. These kinds of changes that fit with the storyline get me excited. I’m going to be tempted to roll a bunch of new characters and start over. I’m sure a lot of people will be doing that.

Q. Will we get some info about the other zones revamped in Cataclysm, like Stranglethorn Vale or Tanaris?

A. Yes, we are hoping to do a few specific web features on a few of the old world zones and exactly what is changing with them. Stranglethorn Vale is seeing a large amount of changes so it is a great candidate for this.

A#2. A. Some Tanaris goblins wisely invested in desert real estate and reaped the benefits when it became beach-front property.

Oh, do I remember the days of STV leveling on a PvP server. Can I say gank city? I remember be camped on multiple occasions. I think it’ll be good for the area to get a face lift. Them goblins are so good with money. I’d be tempted to hire one as an accountant if I didn’t think he’d rob me blind.

Q. Will there be any type of water mount, like, submarines?

A. We actually have two brand new subs that we made for Cataclysm. These submarines will be used as transports. We have one for gnomes and one for goblins. The subs are huge too! Both are about the size of the Gunships from Icecrown.

Can I just say how full of win this is? Now I think I’ll work on leveling my hunter first before making a worgen or goblin just so I can get my engineering up to make one of these. I’m very stoked about this. (update: I thought about this more and more, what was I thinking, these are just going to be like the boats or blimps for massive transport, not a mount. /fail)

Miscellaneous

Q. Where is my moose? Did you see that Ghostcrawler?

A. That was so epic. I was sure the screenshot was shopped until we saw the actual video. I guess we’re going to have to do a moose now…

Yeah, where’s our moose??

This Q&A session got me really excited for up and coming WoW stuff. I’m pretty darn excited for Cataclysm.

Alright, as you can see, my blog looks a little different now. We’ve finally got the blog transferred to a new host, and I’m going to start writing again. Yay!

I’m still kind of a noob when it comes to blogging  (which is sad cause I’ve been WoW blogging for over a year now). So, moving over the DNS for the domain casualhunting.com was a challenge for me (even thought it should have been simple), but whatever. Here’s my new home now. Now I need to get my header up, write some real WoW posts for a change, and figure out what the h3ll I’m doing.

Anyway, I’ll be poking about a little more often now. If you don’t mind.

The balancing act continues. While trying to maintain my status of casual gamer, RL continues to happen. I’m often times more casual than gamer lately. However, I’m still holding on.

My anniversary of this blog is coming up, not sure when, wait a second…. (*looks around in the archives*) oh crap! My first blog entry was actually Nov 11, 2009. Well, dang, I missed my anniversary. Drat. Well, here’s the first post I wrote:

Okay, so I am making a World of Warcraft blog like everybody else and their cat. Yes, their cat. Why am I making this blog when there is way too many out there as it is? Well, I have no body to talk to about my geeky stuff. Even my family and friends who also play world of warcraft don’t care about my geeky hunter related stuff that I ramble on about. So, this is a place for me to ramble about my geekiness to the world. Regardless if I get any followers.

I am a casual WoW player, I have a life outside of wow. I have children and a career that I must attend to. I have had to come to the conclusion that I will never be on the cutting edge of raids or will I ever get all the cool stuff, be on the top for arena or be the first to hit 80. If I did my wife would probably file for divorce, and my kids would never see me. So, I get to play some of the time (mostly when the kids are a sleep). So, I’ll probably go off on casual gaming issues, time management, balancing life, etc. But mostly I want to share what I’m doing in the game, and geeky beast mastery hunter stuff. Is anybody actually going to read this? I have no idea, but what the h3ll, why not. So here is my first blog entry on my geeky wow casual gamer blog.

That was back right before WotLK came out. Good times. So, lately I’ve been feeling the way I did when I first started my blog. I wrote it because no one wants to talk to me about WoW topics in real life. At one point all 3 of my brothers played WoW, but now its down to me and my guild officer brother. And our game style is completely different. Lately I’ve been an altoholic, RPer, who happens to have an inclination towards the hunter class. My brother? He’s a raider/ guild officer who mostly plays on his druid. He loves it when my wife and I will play with him, but its not very often lately. My other brothers who use to play WoW just think its a waste of time now. My wife is nice enough to listen to my ramblings, but the game isn’t as important to her as it is to me (but we have been playing more often on our Draenei toons). So, who do I talk to about the game, my latests RP adventures, and the new up and coming changes to the hunter class? Well, first, here I ramble and about it, then twitter, and now google wave.  That was the reason I originally started a blog and that’s why I’m still on here now.

Of course my blog writing has slowed, its difficult to find time to write and I’ve been trying to figure out just what I want to do with this blog. I’ve come to the conclusion that I just don’t have enough time to stay on top of the news, but there are plenty of other blogs /podcasts that do that nicely anyway. I’ve tried to do social commentary/ feature article on random WoW topics, and I’ll continue to do that when I feel like it. I’ve only recently started to share my RP stories (partly so I have a place to back them up), and I hope y’all enjoyed that. I’m afraid the blog has turned into a weekly or biweekly blog post. RL just gets in the way very frequently (along with writers block).

Plus I’ve met some awesome people through blogging and tweeting. I’ve joined new guilds, started new toons, and even started RPing because of you people. So, thanks for the good times, and hopefully there’ll be some future blog anniversaries as we go along.

I’m sorry I keep throwing out these articles are you guys, but this one was a kind of funny read. The article is entitled “Online World of Warcraft casts a spell” from the Monterey County Herald. There are some funny things in there, and some reminders that some people are just plain stupid. I had to share with you some of my favorite parts of the article.

“Some players skip meals, miss work, avoid sleep, abandon relationships, ignore the phone, literally escaping what no longer feels like real life on behalf of reinventing themselves as characters in a figment of their own dreams and imaginings. Others insist they have it in check.”

I like to think that the majority of us have it in check. Stupid people keep making a bad name for us, again, it’s not the game. If it wasn’t WoW it would be something else for these people. Now this whole “reinventing themselves”, that’s just silly in my opinion. Oh and I don’t skip meals.

“I’m used to playing every day, on average, maybe four hours a day. Sometimes, on the weekends, I’ve played for well over 12 hours a day. I think it’s the ultimate form of escapism. I mean, here is this whole other world that is a lot friendlier and more exciting than the one we live in.”

Have any of you played 12 hours in a day? I don’t think I have the stamina for it.

“The Internet is littered with stories of abandonment and betrayal, projected affection and protracted engagement, financial ruin and divorce, ostensibly related to WoW. A now popular Internet report out of the United Kingdom begins, “A woman has divorced her husband after he used the computer game World of Warcraft to conduct affairs with a series of imaginary woodland creatures.”

Imaginary woodland creatures?? Brigwyn could have a hay day with that line right there.

“Once, I came into his office wearing Victoria Secret silky blue booty shorts and a tank top to get his attention. He said, ‘Do you have to do that right now? Can’t you see I’m just starting a raid?’ And when our 3-year-old daughter came in and said, ‘Daddy, can I have some apple juice?’ He told her he couldn’t leave his raid, and told me, ‘If I get killed during this raid because I went to get apple juice, it will be on your head.’ He doesn’t call it an addiction. I call it much more than that.”

Okay, look. There are some things that are just more important than WoW. I would have to tell my guildies that “you guys, looks like some family emergency came up, hmm, I’ll have to see you guys later”. Now, I understand being in a raid when your daughter asks you for a drink. Of course saying “If I get killed, it’ll be on your head” to your 3-year-old? Now that’s just silly.

“I think I was addicted to the game when I first started playing four-and-a-half years ago, much the way I would be with anything new and exciting, and not unlike the fascination with, say, a new car,” said Philip Geiger, 46, of Carmel. “But it was pointed out to me, and I agreed. I never abandoned my daily responsibilities and interests and, in time, it found its place in my life. I now go on two 2-hour raids a week, after the dishes are done and my child is in bed, plus two or three hours a night a few other nights a week. You could say, for me, it replaces TV.”

As I’ve said before, this is probably what most people are like. But hey, who wants to write articles about normal boring people like us?

This just came out on the blue posts regarding BM hunter changes for patch 3.2.2

* The Beast Within now lasts 10 sec (Down from 18 sec) but now also increases all damage you deal by 10% at all time.
* Bestial Wrath now lasts 10 sec. (Down from 18 sec)

So, now the damage is dealt all of the time, and then actually using the Beast Within doesn’t do so much damage, except break crowd control and help out with mana. This isn’t going to be a very happy thing among BM hunter PvPers. It was always fun to watch that poor warlock try to fear me and my pet right before getting hit with an intimidation. Ha! Look at me talk, more often than not I get owned by warlocks. I’m not much of a PvPer; however, I do love a good battle ground.

So, when are BM hunters going to be thrown some real love? I would like my primary spec to be a viable spec again, not just my solo spec.

An interesting study/report came out that compared addictiveness to the type/genre of the game. You can see the report for yourself from the Nielson Company “Insights on Casual Games”.

So apparently solitare and other casual games are just as addictive as WoW, but RPG gamers tend to put more time into the game. Casual players according to this study tend to be female, while more hardcore players tend to be male (mind you, I’m not talking about casual wow players, but those who prefer casual games such as solitaire). I don’t really care for this kind of boring, rather watch paint dry, kind of games myself, unless I’m super bored and I have nothing else I can do.

I guess you can sometimes get away with casual games at work where you can’t play Warcraft or what not. But its nice to see that they are just as addictive.

So, its nice to see World of Warcraft being seen in a positive light in the media (doesn’t happen often, but from time to time we see something).

There was a short article of little interest in the New York Observer. A tennis playe, Taylor Dent, had an serious back injury and wasn’t able to play professional tennis for more than two years. Doctors told him they doubted that he’d ever be able to play tennis again. He sunk into a depression upon hearing the news. What helped him in that difficult time? World of Warcraft of course. Dent was able to come back to tennis recently. Do you think he was able to improve his game because of Warcraft? I don’t know.

But seriously, its about time we hear things like this instead of “Addictive video game, World of Warcraft ruins lives families, causes child abuse, increases the college drop out rate, and is awful for your skin… oh and causes cancer.” Come on its just a game, and look it helped out this guy keep distracted while he was recovering. That brings up a question, could WoW lessen the suffering with others with injuries, diseases, and whatnot? If someone is bed ridden couldn’t WoW help them still feel like they have a social life, connect with others some how, still feel useful? This brings up some interesting areas to discuss in the future.