New glyphs

New glyphs for 3.1 have been announced for testing. The tanking ones are:

Glyph of Heroic Strike -- Increases the critical strike chance of Heroic Strike by 5%. (Old: You gain 10 rage when you critically strike with your Heroic Strike ability.)
Glyph of Barbaric Insults -- Your Mocking Blow ability generates 100% additional threat. (Old: Your Mocking Blow ability also taunts the target.)
Glyph of Shockwave *new* -- Reduces the cooldown on Shockwave by 3 sec.
Glyph of Vigilance *new* -- Your Vigilance ability transfers an additional 5% of your target's threat to you.
Glyph of Enraged Regeneration *new* -- Your Enraged Regeneration ability heals for an additional 10% of your health over its duration.
Glyph of Spell Reflection *new* -- Reduces the cooldown on Spell Reflection by 1 sec.
Glyph of Shield Wall *new* -- Reduces the cooldown on Shield Wall by 3 min, but Shield Wall now only reduces damage taken by 40%.

On the basis that [Glyph of Blocking] will continue to be mandatory, this leaves 2 major slots. The shield wall glyph is so good that unless it is nerfed before it goes live then that too will be necessary. This leaves one slot.

The other glyph is pretty much a matter of personal choice, and in fact it may be necessary to reglyoh for specific fights. I like the enraged regen glyph as a noticeable improvement in one of our "oh sh*t" buttons, but the vigilance glyph will be useful if as predicted our ability to generate threat fails to scale at the same rate as the dps classes.

Hand still trashed

This is pretty much all I've been doing recently.

V frustrating - I've had the operation and had a load of metal put into my hand, but have to keep it elevated and so have been sitting here with my arm in the air like an Arsenal defender. Have got a little movement back already so am hopeful of a halfway decent recovery. Early days though.

Fishing watch

324 skill now.

God I miss instancing...

D'oh!

I've broken my left thumb playing football, and have to have an operation to rebuild the "smashed" [~my surgeon] joint. At best I will be in a cast for about 6 weeks. At worst I will never regain movement in that thumb. While I can still currently play warcraft, my ability to move and fight at the same time is poor so I won't do instances for a while. PvP is also out sadly.

I will take it easy - level my fishing, grab some achievements and generally enjoy the game world for a bit.

Sapphiron's demise

This was during the third attempt...

And the aftermath...

End game

Thinking back to when the previous expansion was launched, we had five raid dungeons all of which were brand new:

Karazhan (10 man) - 10 bosses I think, including some very tough fights (eg Shade of Aran)
Gruul (25 man) - only 2 bosses, but both challenging and requiring careful planning and gear
Magtheridon (25) - 1 boss, but so hard that he was regularly skipped by progression guilds until he was nerfed quite hard in I think patch 2.3.
Serpentshrine Cavern (25) - 6 bosses
Tempest Keep (25) - 4 bosses

We then had four further dungeons released later - Zul'Aman (10), Mount Hyjal (25), Black Temple (25) and Sunwell (25).

All of the 25 man bosses were a real achievement to down. Most took a week or two of trying for all but the most hardcore guilds and a first kill was a thing to celebrate and post on your guild forums. Because of the very tight attunement requirements to the "next" instance, Vashj and Kael'thas in particular got a reputation as "guild breakers", where guilds would break because of an inability to beat them and progress onwards. I remember my own guild getting stuck at Lurker in SSC for about 2 months, and our GM (normally such a controlled guy) losing it near the end and telling us "Just f*cking kill him this time, I'm sick and tired of wiping on this f*cking fish."

Now we have four raid dungeons - Naxxramas (15 bosses), Sanctum (1 boss), Malygos (1 boss) and Vault (1 boss). To be blunt it's getting boring for a lot of guilds, especially those who cleared Naxx the first time round in vanilla warcraft. Blizzard have said that more content will be released, but guilds like ours are crying out for something, anything, to do. Malygos is down in both 10 and 25 man, we can now clear Naxx in four and a half hours even with casual players rotated in, and just about all that is left is Sanctum with multiple drakes left up (hard mode).

I understand Blizzard's determination to open up raid content to the masses - most people never saw past Karazhan in the last expansion, but that was served by making Naxx easy (even I have cleared 3 of the wings multiple times, and I've only run 4 raids) and I think the amazing content that they've delivered in creating Northrend is being badly let down by the lack of end-game. You very rarely get cheers on vent when the boss goes down these days, and while I think more people are in epics than ever before, it's sad that the sense of raiding achievement is going.

Bring on Ulduar. Please.

Perspective

My mother in law died a couple of weeks ago. It really puts things into perspective. I haven't been online as much as normal, and I haven't felt it to be appropriate to spend an evening raiding since I think my family need to have me around at that time.

Warcraft is a real escape, and so I still find myself thinking about it quite a lot, but it's not me that needs to deal with all this stuff so I've been holding off.