Happy 45th Birthday Doctor Who!
Happy 4th Birthday World Of Warcraft!
Although both are entirely different, they are two of my favourite distractions in life. Countless hours of enjoyment have been (and no doubt will continue to be) derived from these creations.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the two could somehow be combined?
As far as history goes, last week was quite a week wasn’t it? I mean, how can the most important presidential election in a millenium be topped? Could it even be possible?
Hold on to your britches folks, cause this week is even bigger!
I speak of course of the fact that two of the most awaited games of all time are to be released within a day of each other: Animal Crossing: City Folk and World Of Warcraft: Wrath Of The Lich King!
< Animal Crossing
< Lich King
Animal Crossing is out Wednesday, Lich King thursday. I’ll buy both. In fact I’ll be at Wal-Mart on midnight wednesday night to get Lich King the second it goes on sale. Then I’ll play it like a maniac through the weekend. Of course during this time I’ll also play Animal Crossing, a game which by it’s very nature demands the player to play every single day without ever missing one!
Which will prevail? I have, for a few years now, alternated between saying that both Animal Crossing (previous versions) and WoW are both the most addictive games ever. The first Animal Crossing (on gamecube) I played every single day with no exceptions for six months. That said, my Warcraft character has 100 days (2400 hours!) total playtime!
It’s a good thing Winter is almost here. I may not be going outside for a while 🙂
Edit: as an addendum to my post, although Animal Crossing ships this week, it has a street date of Sunday. So my WoWing will be unimpeded for 2 days!
So I /combatlogged the King Gordok fight just now…
< Read at your own risk!
…to explain, JBF and I are playing WoW again, and this morning did the west and north sides of Dire Maul. The run was fun since my memory was hazy of west and almost nonexistent of north, so it was a bit like unexplored territory. Furthermore Foosrazzle (JBF’s character) recently respecced to Retribution, which means he does much more dps, so things die faster 🙂
Anyway I used the command /combatlog to dump the entire log of the final battle against King Gordok. After we finished I (hastily) loaded it up in Excel and did a bit of analysis:
Foosrazzle
Total time in combat: 14 seconds
Total damage dealt: 5683
Damage Per Second (dps): 406
Largest single attack: 1218 (critical melee swing)
Momomo
Total time in combat: 12 seconds
Total damage dealt: 25123 (includes 4305 water elemental damage)
Damage Per Second (dps): 2094
Largest single attack: 4025 (frostbolt crit)
So, were I the sort inclined to enjoy analyzing such things, I may make a few conclusions from these results. Firstly, Foosrazzle never once used Crusader Strike. This means he missed the chance to twice (it’s on a 6 second cooldown) deal an additional ~600 damage to the King, raising his effective dps by about 20%. Furthermore, had he used crusader strike immediately, he may have gotten it off *three* times (at 0 seconds, 6 seconds and 12 seconds) raising his dps by over 30%!
Even better, if this had happened then it would have almost certainly meant the 3800 damage killing blow delivered by Momomo – which actually overkilled King Gordok by some 2800 hp, would never have occured. This means Momo’s effective dps may have lowered by as much as 4%. Or, to put it in perspective, Foos’s percentage of total dps would have risen by about 1.3%
The message is clear: Foos, use Crusader Strike!
Seriously though, doing this was kind of addicting and I’m sure I’ll be /combatlogging again in the future. If only to plan how the two of us will tackle such things as duo Onyxia, ZG and possibly some early MC bosses!
And Foos – just keep playing however you like 🙂
Wonderfest was recently held in Tokyo. This is a convention where figure makers showcase all their upcoming products. The best single site of images of the new stuff I could find is here. The site loads slowly, is all in Japanese, has some mild NSFW content and will be incomprehensible to anyone that doesn’t truly understand the otaku tag of this post!
What can we see from those pictures? For starters, cute girls continue to dominate. For seconders, articulation is here in a big way (the four set of Lucky Star ‘figma’ girls is amazing…). For thirders: R-Type Command gashapon?!
Anyway, I hadn’t yet blogged that we got one of the Haruhi figma’s I fell in love with at Comic Con. I’ll snap some shots this weekend and show her off 🙂
(If you have not watched the season four Doctor Who finale, there are spoilers in this entry.)
One of the best things about new Who is how creative the series continues to be. Testament to the skill of the writing and acting, even a downright preposterous series of ideas – such as those contained in the season four ender Journey’s End – are entirely acceptable to the viewer simply because the show is so damn good.
I mean flying the Earth home? Or the transformation of Donna Noble? The way the entire Rose arc was ended? In lesser hands, such things would have been reasons to scoff at the show.
The true beauty of this episode though, was twofold. Firstly, I loved the way the (real) Doctor had oh-so-clearly moved on from Rose: “Does it have to be spoken?”
Secondly, the way that Donna’s story was wrapped up, although not a death, was in many ways worse. Here was a woman that had been given so much, only then to have it all taken away.
As a diehard, lifelong fan, two other aspects of this episode were marvelous in so many ways. Firstly, every iota of me wanted Davros to accept that invitation and enter the TARDIS. Secondly, this scene (and BS, you better watch that and realise just what you’re missing not watching new Who) is 24 seconds of why this show never ceases to amaze.
And so Russel T Davies wraps his tenure on the show up nicely, with a bit of a reset as well. One can only imagine to what heights Steven Moffat will bring the series in 2010.